Ethan Hawke, twice Golden Globe nominee, during several exclusive interviews with the journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press spanning a dozen years, starting from 1997 to 1999, 2001, 2004, 2008, and 2010, often talked about the seminal experience of working in Dead Poets Society (1989) at age 18 and being directed by Peter Weir as a young actor. He directed the documentary The Last Movie Stars (2022) about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
Hawke explained how he started acting at age 13, in the movie Explorers (1985) by Joe Dante, but why he then went back to school, as his mother wished: “I came to the audition as a complete lark, because a friend of mine was auditioning, but Joe Dante got fascinated by me and gave me my first job. That movie didn’t really take off and my mother insisted I go back to high school; she didn’t want me to be a child actor and she would have never let me audition if she thought I would have gotten the role. I shot the movie in 1984 with River Phoenix, when we were both thirteen, so I’ve been professionally acting through the great majority of my conscious life. And I felt that, if I didn’t branch out and try to do some other things, I would end up living a less full life. So, I wrote a short novel about a twenty-year-old protagonist who falls in love with this girl, and she doesn’t like him, so he loses his mind. So, I’ve been professionally writing since I was thirteen and writing my first book “The Hottest State” in 1986 had great value to me. It was such a great experience for me, and I almost published it, then I got scared, I rewrote it completely and published it later, in 1996.”
The actor said that he felt really sad when his Explorers costar, River Phoenix, tragically died in 1993 at the age of 23: “I know there is this whole glorification of drugs in our youth culture, but it’s more than that, it’s a glorification of beauty, and the idea that fifteen-year-olds have about who’s a great person, which is somebody without any wisdom or any kind of spiritual development. I’m not a drug abuser anyway, so that’s not an issue for me, but something rippled through my community when River died. It’s obviously poetic to die on the Sunset Strip on heroin, but I thought it was so beneath him that it made me sad, because he was a very young man, and a real artist, so I wished that his life didn’t end like that.”
Hawke revealed that Explorers eventually lead to his being cast in his second movie, Dead Poets Society (1989) directed by Peter Weir: “What happened is that, when I went away to college, an agent that had known me from Explorers days told me about a film called Dead Poets Society that had a lot of parts for young kids. I was miserable at college and my mom wasn’t in control of my life anymore, so I went and auditioned, and I got the part. I remember that day staying up all night and being so nervous. I’ve since seen the screen-test and my hair was so long that it was completely in front of my face, so I have no idea of why I got hired, but Peter Weir saw something in me and that changed the whole course of my life. I was an 18-year-old kid who didn’t know what he wanted to do and all of a sudden, these avenues of opportunity opened up for me, so I’ve been really fortunate in that regard, and I’ve always thought that it was my obligation then to do something with that and to work hard because being in Dead Poets Society was a huge gift. After I dropped out to do the movie, I then went back to college for a little while as an English major, and that’s where the idea of writing that first book and running my theater company Malaparte came up; some of the other different things I’ve done have been in aspiration of educating myself or taking responsibility for my own education.”
This is what the young actor learned from being directed by Peter Weir about making movies and being involved in the arts: “I am still in touch with Peter, and he is a seminal figure in my life. What Robin Williams was to the kids in Dead Poets Society that is what Peter Weir was to us young people acting in that movie. He taught me to expect the best, from yourself and from others, and what making a movie should be like, where you’re not making it for a self-serving reason, and what the dream of being involved in the arts really is. Peter knew how to create that feeling, which is a very difficult thing to do. Most people are just trying to make a buck, to be a big shot, they don’t have a story to tell, they just want to impress you somehow and it’s exhausting to be around them. But when you meet somebody like Peter, who has a story to tell and a lot of love in his heart and is motivated, whose aim is true, it’s exciting to be around. It happens a handful of times and it’s special when it does, so Peter set the bar for me. And he does happen to be one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.”
Hawke was influenced by Peter Weir in his own theater directing, and by other directors, he admired from the 1970s: “Peter Weir was definitely the most influential director on my life, from such a young age he influenced the way I think about film and what I expect from a film experience. I’ve directed some plays and my approach to directing comes from a great love of acting and what I’ve learned from all my directors, like Andrew Niccol (Gattaca 1997) or Scott Hicks (Snow Falling in Cedars 1999). But the films that I grew up loving and wanting to be a part of are not easily getting made right now. There was that whole 1970s group, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Arthur Penn, John Cassavetes, Bob Fosse, Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola. There were so many fun and eccentric movies getting made, while now our whole world is becoming so much more commercialized and compartmentalized that’s a struggle as a person involved in the arts to not let your work become too much of a product.”
Hawke mentioned many writers, actors, and directors who have inspired him in his career. “I feel I’ve had the privilege of a great education; I’ve gotten to meet a lot of really serious-minded people in directing, writing, acting. I’ve been on a Paul Newman kick since his passing, and I watched Hud the other day where he and Patricia Neal are so uniquely good. That made me think about the Actors Studio in that there was a real push at that moment in America where people were treating acting as an art, and it really started popping with Marlon Brando and Elia Kazan, then the next wave of Gene Hackman and Al Pacino and Robert De Niro and all the work that they were doing that was incredibly exciting. But no movie studio executive is going to hand you that kind of work, you have to earn, and you do it by caring and trying. The reason why I try to put myself in unique situations in writing, directing, and acting in challenging projects is to keep being nervous and scared because fear is a great motivator. You got to put yourself in situations where you can learn because as soon as you stop doing that in the arts, that’s when you can get lazy.”