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Q&A with Ethan Hawke

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Wildcat.

Can you start by telling us about your exposure to Flannery O’Connor throughout your life?
Ethan Hawke: I was first given Flannery O’Connor by my mother, who was trying to prompt the inner feminist in me. Because all I was doing was reading guys. When I was getting ready to film the movie, I had to bring some of the books down with me. The script was already done, but I looked through my bookcase and pulled down a different copy of A Good Man is Hard to Find, which I realized was given to me by Julie Delpy in the summer of ’94 when we were doing Before Sunrise, and I was like, ah! All the feminists in my life have been giving me her for years. But I really didn’t get deeply familiar with her until my daughter Maya did a whole season on Flannery O’Connor in her junior year of high school. She fell in love with Flannery, and she started discovering she wanted to talk to me about it. And so it was through my conversations with Maya that my awareness of her work deepened.

A movie about Flannery O’Connor would have to be a movie about imagination

I imagine exposing yourself to her work in preparation to make a movie is a very different experience, in terms of revealing something else about her as a human being.
The whole thing happened so strangely. Maya had discovered a book that was published not too long ago by Flannery called A Prayer Journal, which was a journal of her letters to God as a young woman, as she was kind of seeking to discover herself. And when Maya was auditioning for theater school, she adapted some of these journals into a monologue as an audition piece. That was really fun and cool, and when Stranger Things kind of blew up, Maya was still thinking about this character that she had played and wanted to explore it more. She thought about getting the rights to the work and she approached my wife—who’s my producing partner—and I and asked if we would produce and direct a movie about it. And your first thought, when a young person that you respect says something like that to you, you say yes. But as I thought about the little I knew about Flannery, I wondered what movie could possibly be there? All I knew was that she was sick and she fed chickens and she wrote. There’s not much of a life there to dramatize. Then I started rereading all her work and realized that her imagination and her faith are both so incredibly powerful and the intersection of the two was so interesting that we could make a movie about that. A movie about Flannery O’Connor would have to be a movie about imagination.

Talk me through your process of identifying which stories you’re going to use. I know “Parker’s Back,” right? The energy of that story is so incredible.
Yeah, most of us aren’t familiar with all of them, but I went through the canon and I was really looking for several things. It’s kind of like a peacock fan. Each feather is individual, but seen collectively it becomes something else, and I thought that each one of these stories could represent an aspect of her and I thought about which part of her is in these stories. I read them all looking to see which ones would tell me something about Flannery O’Connor. And they also had to reveal something so that it would make sense to have Maya and Laura [Linney] play aspects of their characters. Maya was 24 when we were making this, and Flannery was diagnosed with lupus at 24, so that seemed obvious, right? Let’s focus on this death sentence that she got. We’ll build a movie around those couple months, and we’ll kind of explore her imagination in that time period. I was looking for things that she would be thinking about when she realizes she’s trapped back in Milledgeville. Oh, a doctor’s office, wanting to strangle her mother… alright, let’s put that there. We kind of built it that way.

The trailer you use to open the film is a beautifully constructed way to introduce us to Flannery. The humanity of her, the humor, and the gothic.
Thanks. I did a Brecht play years ago, and Brecht had this idea that audiences struggle with, but it’s kind of profound, which is trying to make the experience of being in the theater not like falling asleep. Like, you can go to sleep and we’re going to entertain you and tell you exactly how to feel. But he really wanted to invite the audience into the experience and remind you that you’re watching a play all the time. It’s arresting and confusing. The one adaptation that was made of Flannery’s work in her lifetime was The Life You Save May Be Your Own with Gene Kelly. When asked about it she said, “Well, it’s possible to imagine that it could have been worse.” And that really stuck with me, that quote, because I realized she would hate a movie being made about all this. It was important to, right off the bat, remind the audience that we’re making a movie. This is not Wikipedia, this is not a documentary. This is a work of art. We wanted to do two things simultaneously—to set up the fraudulence of film, and to set up that Maya and Laura are going to be double cast. We wanted to get that going in the audience’s mind early, so that it wouldn’t be confusing later. And, that there’s something punk about Flannery’s work. There’s something irreverent and witty and weird and unsettling. And I thought we had to try to cinematically match that.

Can you discuss your process of working with your co-writer Shelby Gaines? How did you discover the character of Flannery together?
Flannery was a complicated woman from the Jim Crow South. There was so much complexity to being an American artist of that time and that era. And she felt that she was sentenced to death at 24. She died at 39, but she didn’t live a year of her life certain that she would see the next year—she was faced with mortality at a young age, and she felt trapped in Milledgeville, Georgia. Shelby and I were writing this movie for Maya. If Maya had been 38 when she wanted to do this, maybe we would have written a deathbed movie. I mean, that was an obvious end to the story. But Maya was 24, and Flannery was diagnosed with lupus at 24, so we decided to center it there. She hadn’t really been published besides one story in Partisan Review before the end of the movie. So, we basically felt like this whole movie was leading to a final moment. Shelby had this insight, knowing that she really didn’t want to be in Georgia. She put her typewriter against her dresser, and she turned her typewriter away from the window, and Shelby was hypnotized by this. She had a line above her typewriter, “The kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” Which we kind of took to mean, wow, that she didn’t have to go anywhere. We’d let the movie build to her realization that she could bring the world to her, that everything was inside of her. The movie is really about her acceptance of her diminishments. That she was going to lose her health. She wasn’t going to be a social person. And that that was going to be okay. And that seemed like a profound realization for the whole movie to build to. And we kind of used her life’s work to imagine first drafts of the stories, when she had the idea for those stories.

Q&A with Ethan Hawke and Paul Schrader

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of First Reformed.

What was the genesis of this film?
Paul Schrader: The process began about three years ago when I was giving an award for Pawel Pawlikowski, for his film Ida at the New York Society of Film Critics. I liked Ida a lot. Ida is also a square format, a locked off movie. And we’re talking about spiritual cinema and also about the lower cost of filmmaking whereby certain films that were financially irresponsible in the past might not be so irresponsible today. And I was walking back uptown and I said, “You know, you’re going to be 70 next year. It’s time. It’s time to write that movie that you have been swearing for decades you would never write.” That’s how that process started.

How was it shooting for such a short period of time?
PS: Well when you’re involved in this kind of film, you are involved with various withholding devices. You’re holding back things that the viewer has expected in timing or in music, pacing, and also in performance. The first time I met with Ethan, I said to him, “You know this is a laid back performance,” and he knew exactly what I meant.

Ethan Hawke: There’s a certain kind of performance that’s involved in entertaining you, where you go meet the audience, and there’s another one where you retreat and you ask them to follow you. And everything that Paul did, the writing, the filmmaking, everything was oriented towards a different way of entertaining. It was a wonderful experience. It’s really exciting to be acting for someone who has studied film. People love to talk about how many days you shot a movie as if it has anything to do with it at all. Sometimes you can spend years preparing for a movie and you might shoot it in a few days, but it doesn’t mean you haven’t spent years working on it. I’ve been on movies that have shot 100 Days, and they haven’t put any thought into it, and they’re just a big mess. I wish they shot for 20 days!

“The secret of theft, which is also called ‘creativity,’ is you have to steal a bit from a lot of different places.”

Throughout the film, there are references to other movies, but it feels as if those references are owned by you both. Why does this film feel as if it has transcended its influences?
PS: The secret of theft, which is also called “creativity,” is you have to steal a bit from a lot of different places. You can’t go to the same 7/11 every time because they’ll catch you. So you go to the photo shop, and you go to the gas station, and you go to that little hot dog stand that nobody goes to and by the end you’ve stolen enough stuff from enough places that people think its yours.

EH: Another way of saying that is… Getting an education. One of the things that frustrates me is I’ll be on a film set and I’ll say, “Well, you know this scene is kind of reminiscent of Five Easy Pieces.” And perfectly legitimate film directors will not know what that is. It’s really frustrating to me. The quality of the writing dissipates, and the quality of the performance dissipates when people aren’t educating themselves. A good rock and roller knows the history of music. You steal from this, and you take a little pieces of this chord progression, and in the process of doing that, you come out. Your own voice appears.

When you were reading and writing the script did you have an idea that it would be so prescient?
PS: Obviously the situation with our physical world has not been good for some time, and that I don’t think is going to change. But let me take issue with you there because we’re going now in kind of a weird spot in independent movies. It’s so easy to make films. Maybe 15,000 or 20,000 films get made a year in this country alone. And of those 15,000, ten of them rise above the crowd and get noticed. How do you get to be one of those ten films? And I’ve sort of learned over the last six months that first you go through the gatekeepers, which are the festivals. Then you go through all kinds of special programs, and we showed it to South by Southwest in March. Now it’s been shown at maybe twenty-five festivals around the world. And I went to a meeting at A24 and that’s when they decided to give it the theatrical push. They waited six months just to see if it would endure and run the gauntlet. Will people still be interested in it after two more weeks– two more months? And so it is this exhausting process to prove that you are worthy of the investment of a theatrical feature. A company like A24 probably puts a push on maybe four films a year.

Could you talk about the opening of the film and why openings are so important?
PS: You teach the audience how to watch yourself and that’s why I like credits in the front of the movie because you get two or three minutes. They don’t hold you responsible for the credits. And you can use those two or three minutes to teach them about your film. Whether it be zany credits or melancholic credits. The idea behind the film was it was going to be all locked off. And then I got to this location and said, “OK. That shot just cries out as you walk up the hill.” And so instead stealing the first shot from Winter Light, I stole the first shot from Silent Light, the Reygadas film where he had that long, long incremental push forward at daybreak. But everything else was locked down. No pan, no tilt, no overs. When doing so it kind of creates an uncomfortable feeling.