Kok jadi copy paste-an ya? Anyhoo, The Guardian selalu menulis
wawancara dengan menarik, dan kali ini subyek dan topiknya emang
menarik; Ethan Hawke. Dia bicara banyak tentang coming-of-age,
keberanian menerbitkan buku, dan tentang argumen pilihan-pilihan
filmnya; antara komersil-non pilihan.
Another sunrise
Ethan Hawke is an actor who takes risks. It's why he went back to
college after his big film break, why he chanced ridicule by writing
novels, and why he loves those challenging roles. Dan Halpern meets
him
Saturday October 8, 2005
The Guardian
Tough and tender ... Ethan Hawke in Lord of War and Before Sunrise
Last month, Ethan Hawke moved out of the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan.
He'd been living in the former home of Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller and
Sid Vicious for two years, having moved in amid the very public
dissolution of his marriage to the actor Uma Thurman. Since then,
their two children, Maya and Roan, have split their time between the
Chelsea and Thurman's home. "My daughter is like the Eloise of the
place [the storybook character who is everybody's best friend at the
New York Plaza Hotel]. She knows everybody. I think - I hope - that
this will be a magical place for her in memory." A few days before the
moving vans come, we are standing in the lobby, where a large,
somewhat alarming sculpture of a very pink woman on a swing hangs from
the ceiling.
Article continues
To an extent, the Chelsea has been a magical place for Hawke: it's
where he directed his first movie, Chelsea Walls, a rambling, moody
piece about a collection of artists, alcoholics and ruined lovers,
released in 2001. It's one of the things he is proudest of - along
with his novels, The Hottest State and Ash Wednesday, and the work he
did with Richard Linklater and Julie Delpy on Before Sunrise and, more
recently, Before Sunset.
Now Hawke, 35, who became the thinking girls' poster boy in the 90s
thanks to smart, complicated performances in films such as Reality
Bites and Gattaca, is leaving the temple, moving into his own place in
the neighbourhood. It's been a productive couple of years - he has
starred in four very different movies, two plays off Broadway, and
begun work on a third novel - but it's time to find his own feet.
"When you start young, your fear is, you're always worrying, is it
over?" he says over lunch in a restaurant not far from the hotel.
Dressed in jeans and a tracksuit jacket, he is, surprisingly, more
handsome than he appears on screen. "Have I had a great run and now do
I have to adjust to, 'Hey, when I was in my 20s, I was kind of a
famous actor'? But the truth is, I've never wanted to be a movie star
- and I've been pretty clear about that."
What he always wanted to be was an actor. The celebrity part just
happened, and early - a function of his starring role in Dead Poets
Society when he was just a teenager. "People look at your life and see
things as a big deal that aren't a big deal to you. What I mean is,
the chapter breaks are different for me. I'll read about my divorce,
and what people think about it, and, well, it's so inaccurate,
usually, but the fact is, I wouldn't want it to be accurate. Because
it's my truth. When I was younger, it was more important to me to come
off well. Now, I just want to try to be good at what I do." He gives
just the gesture of a shrug, and a grin that has a lot of lamb and a
little bit of wolf about it.
He's decided to trust people, he says - no mean feat after the flaying
he took in the press after his split with Thurman. (He was
photographed with a waitress while filming in Montreal, and was
variously accused of being a serial philanderer, envying Thurman her
career - she was shooting Kill Bill at the time - and wanting a
stay-at-home wife.)
Hawke says he refuses to let the attention affect his choices, in
either his career or his life. "Everybody who gets divorced
experiences gossip. The real human issues are really the same. My
friends who know me well say I have incredible powers of denial. My
daughter said a funny thing to me the other day. She said, 'What's
Training Day [the 2001 movie he made with Denzel Washington]?' And I
said, 'Why?' She said, 'Because when we walk down the street, I keep
hearing it, everybody's saying, "Training Day, Training Day",
whispering, "Training Day." ' I just block it out. And it's gotten me
into some trouble. When my marriage is falling apart, I'll kiss a girl
in a bar with everyone watching and not give a shit because I've just
blocked it out. I've forgotten that I'm going to have to read about
it. I mean, what a moronic move! But I just want to move through space
like a human being and nothing else, and sometimes I forget I don't
always get to."
As an actor, Hawke has tended to go for unusual, complex parts in
unusual, complex movies. And on stage, too: while living in the
Chelsea, he played the combustible Hotspur in a well-received Henry
IV, and starred as a deeply unlikable character in the off-Broadway
hit Hurlyburly. He says Training Day, in which he plays a naive rookie
policeman corrupted by one of modern cinema's most watchable,
complicated villains (an extraordinary Denzel Washington), was a major
turning point in as much as it showed him that a film could be both
subtle and entertaining, a critical and a commercial success. "When
you can thread that needle," he says, "a movie that doesn't pander,
but is still entertainment, that's a great goal. I'm always faulted
for, well, I was never interested in entertainment. Until recently.
Then I kind of played around with the idea: what kind of
responsibility do you have as an entertainer? Everyone has a role in
the community. I know there's a great percentage of people out there
who don't want to spend their Saturday night seeing Before Sunset -
two people sitting around yammering about their middle-class problems.
Training Day was my best experience in Hollywood. And a lot of that
you have to give up to the fact that, pure and simple, Denzel
Washington is a great movie star. Each generation there's two or three
- and he's it."
That doesn't mean Hawke is completely sold on the genre. "A lot of
these movies, they're really enjoyable to see. Really, it's like
smoking crack or something: you walk out, and you feel diminished by
it. It's eye candy, just violence and sex. Definitely lots of sex,
people making out or showing their tits, which is always fun, but it
wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. I tried it - I tried doing
this Angelina Jolie movie [Taking Lives, 2004], a popcorn movie, the
first movie I did that's about nothing. And I didn't like it, because
I do ultimately feel there's enough crap like this. It's so much more
fun and harder and more challenging to try to make something that's
entertaining but isn't wasting your time."
His new film, Lord Of War, is the story of an amoral arms dealer
(Nicolas Cage), a morality tale with a clear political point of view
that still supplies the guns and girls that audiences seem to require.
Cage, as Yuri Orlov, a Ukrainian émigré in Brooklyn, supplies arms to
whomever wants them, with no second thought as to the consequences.
Hawke is an Interpol agent in vain, dogged pursuit. It's an ambitious
film, inspired by genuine political and social outrage, but the
critical response in the US has been mixed. One reviewer complained
that the film is self-defeating: while the script is clearly
anti-guns, visually it can't help but celebrate them.
"The irony is that that criticism is the only reason this script got
made, that the guns are sexy," Hawke says. But it's also the point of
the film. "The devil is seductive, and so guns are glorious in the
culture. I understand there's a case to be made. For instance, Spike
Lee said something like this, that you can't have a scene with drugs
in a film that doesn't secretly make you want to do drugs. In the same
vein, it's hard to make a movie that's anti-violence because the very
nature of photographing violence eroticises it. But I'm not so sold
that that's true."
His role is fairly small, without much room for character development,
but he took the part largely as an expression of his faith in its
writer-director, Andrew Niccol, whom he met when Niccol directed him
(and Thurman) in the 1997 sci-fi film Gattaca. "I think Andrew ought
to be permanently funded," he says. "I've read his scripts that
haven't gotten made. He has this beautiful futuristic movie that's a
metaphor for the Israel-Palestine issue - it's an incredible script, a
morality tale - and Ewan McGregor and I wanted to do it, and there was
no way we could get the movie done. There's not enough violence in it,
if you can believe that. It's the violence that gets the movie made."
Hawke was born in 1970, in Austin, Texas, where his parents were
students. The marriage broke up when he was three. His mother
remarried, and he was living with her and his stepfather in New Jersey
when, aged 14, he asked her to let him go to a casting call in New
York. He landed in Explorers, playing a kid dreaming of aliens
alongside River Phoenix, who was also making his film debut. "In
hindsight now," he says, "it seems, how the hell did that happen?" But
even that couldn't have prepared him for 1989's Dead Poets Society,
the prep school coming-of-age hit starring Robin Williams. After
filming it, "I decided I didn't want to be an actor and I went back to
college, to NYU as an English major. But then the [film's] success was
so monumental that I was getting offers to be in such interesting
movies and be in such interesting places, and it seemed silly to
pursue anything else."
His performance as a shy student transformed by an inspiring English
teacher was raw and furiously emotional, and got Hawke a good deal of
attention. But it wasn't until 1994 that he made the film that
established him as the representative of his generation's hipster
intellectualism: Reality Bites, an ensemble piece about college
graduates with no idea how to move around in the adult world. Hawke
plays Troy, a sexy, greasy philosopher-prince of slack who spends most
of the movie lying on the couch, mocking the ambitions of his
girlfriend (Winona Ryder) and generally perfecting his supercilious
boy-man act, smarter and holier and far, far cooler than thou. It was
a canny, subtle performance and, almost inevitably, Hawke was mistaken
for his character.
"He's very appealing on one level," says Hawke, "and very unappealing
on another - arrogant, self-absorbed, narcissistic." Then there was
Linklater's Before Sunrise, released in 1995, essentially one long
conversation between Hawke and Julie Delpy, or their characters, Jesse
and Celine. It wasn't the sort of film Americans were used to: the
story of a single night, an exploration of the connection between two
people, with Hawke as an American coming to the end of an
Inter-Railing trip through Europe, a little unsure of himself but also
a little youthfully cocksure, and Delpy as a Parisian student heading
home. The film firmly established him as the anti-Cruise. Two years
ago, Delpy, Hawke and Linklater collaborated again on Before Sunset;
Jesse is now a successful writer, unhappily married with a child, and
when he meets Celine again in Paris the old feelings return.
The film came out shortly after Hawke's divorce, and naturally critics
jumped on the overlap, seeing the miserably married Jesse as a piece
of autobiography. But how does Hawke see Jesse - is he a cad or a
romantic? "He's feeling these incredible things for her, and he's an
incredibly unhappy guy at that moment in his life. She's an oasis, of
sorts," he says, "and whether it's substantive or just lust ... Well,
I feel it's a pretty subversive thing to do in the United States of
America, when you want the guy to cheat on his wife at the end of the
movie. In Tom Hanks's America, in Steven Spielberg's America, I felt
really proud of that."
The best thing about the film, he thinks, is Delpy's part. "What I
love about Celine, what I felt really proud about that script, is that
she's really a fully dimensional woman. It's very rare in movies that
you don't see a male projection of a fantasy woman. I mean, Julie
deserves 90% of the credit, 100% of the credit, but I feel proud of
the collaboration that created that character. Her work in that movie
is my favourite thing about it."
He will admit that there is an autobiographical element to his work.
"I do deal in emotional currency. I try to turn my emotional life into
something that might have value to somebody else. You can say Jesse is
autobiographical, but he's also indicative of what a lot of men of my
generation are going through, don't you think? And if I don't tell the
truth from where I come from, how can I begin to hope to say something
that might be truthful to somebody else?"
Playing himself in a completely literal sense is not what he has in
mind, though. "The person who's had the most impact on acting since
Marlon Brando," he says, "the only person who's really changed acting,
is Julia Roberts. I call it the Julia Roberts School of Acting. It's
an excess of competence. She's got all these imitators, and they just
basically get on screen and smile. The idea is, smile and say your
line. And Julia Roberts herself - well, that's one thing. But she has
a ton of pupils who get on screen and basically just smile. And their
smile is so winning, and so wonderful, that you say, 'I like that
person.' And it drives me crazy, because the point of performance is
not to be liked. My grandfather's a politician [a Texan Democrat], and
he can never understand. He says, 'You've got to stop playing these
people no one would ever like!' But my job is not to be liked. It's to
make interesting things. I want to actually do something, rather than
just be me on screen. Julia Roberts does something with it, but all
her imitators ... It's like the imitators of Raymond Carver, that
generation of writers copying him, I guess: it looks simple to them
and they copy it, but they're missing the thing that made it special."
Writers are just as important to Hawke as actors. He published his
first novel, The Hottest State, in 1996, about a love affair between a
young actor and a singer. "Writing the book had to do with dropping
out of college, and with being an actor. I didn't want my whole life
to go by and not do anything but recite lines. I wanted to try making
something else. It was definitely the scariest thing I ever did. And a
huge learning experience about how not everybody's going to like you,
or like what you do. And you have to ask yourself, is it worthwhile?
Or am I just doing it to be liked? And it was just one of the best
things I ever did. The second book was so much more fun because of
that. The first was just a novelty act, like, 'The kid from Reality
Bites wrote a book? Who does he think he is?' And I understand that."
His second novel, Ash Wednesday, published in 2002, a road story about
an awol soldier and his pregnant girlfriend, owes some debt to the
likes of JD Salinger and Jack Kerouac, but Hawke has a strong, clear
voice. There are many of the concerns that dominate his acting work
from the same period, particularly representations (and
self-representations) of masculinity. "I had a huge depression when my
marriage split up," he says. "But Before Sunset and Hurlyburly ended
up being these giant vents for me, to let it blow through. No matter
how screwed up I was, I was never as screwed up as Eddy in Hurlybury,
the woman-hater."
When he writes, he says, he isn't restricted to the male role: Ash
Wednesday is written in two voices, alternating between the soldier
and his girlfriend. It's his books that take up most of his attention
now: he is planning to direct a film of his first novel, while also
working on the third. "I had felt, from very early on, that the arts
are one thing. I don't know why everything had to become so
specialised," he says. "Actors write movies all the time - but you try
fiction and you're an asshole. Everyone wants to try new things, or
almost everyone. Really great supporting actors want to play the lead,
and lead actors secretly wish they could be character actors. Brad
Pitt doesn't want to be pretty! You know what I mean? Everybody in the
world wants to look like Brad Pitt, and Brad Pitt wants to look like a
regular guy. The general assumption was that I wanted to be taken
seriously. And I understood that, but I knew my own aim - I wanted the
experience. I knew if I wanted to be taken seriously, I should stay an
actor, because I'm a good actor. And it seemed like a lot of fun.
You've got to be curious in this life. You've got to be a little
enthusiastic. I mean, you need a willingness to fail. You've got to be
willing to fall on your face once in a while. And then there was a
rude awakening: hey, man, the whole world isn't here to kiss your ass
and tell you you're wonderful. I'm grateful for it."
At this moment the bill arrives, accompanied by fortune cookies.
"Always so generic," Hawke says, opening his. He reads it. "Yeah.
What's yours?"
"'He who hurries cannot walk with dignity,'" I say.
"That's pretty great," Hawke says. "Yours is better than mine. Mine
is, 'The star of riches is shining on you.' I'd rather walk with
dignity."
