Photos by Ola Rindal
“Cause, you know, it’s always a little bit of a lie, whenever you read a profile on anybody, that there is any narrative to any of our lives. As a writer when you’re writing the profile you have to kind of create a narrative. ‘He was born in Austin and then he did this and then he was in Dead Poets Society and then he was in training day and then he got married and then he got divorced and now he’s in London.’ And you make it like there’s a beginning, middle and an end when, of course, life’s never really happened that way.” Ethan Hawke, London, July 2009
That’s true. Because there are at least fourty-four other film roles to account for. The two novels he’s penned. The countless stage performances and plays he’s directed. His three films as a writer and director. A great piece he wrote on Kris Kristofferson for Rolling Stone. The book prizes he sponsors. And then there’s all the stuff that’s really going on. So, being the writer, and needing to create a narrative, I will just say that the evidence of his journey speaks for itself. I tracked down Ethan in London where he’s playing Autolycus in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Trofimov in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. He has three new films coming out, Daybreakers, Brooklyn’s Finest, and New York, I Love You, some film collaborations with Richard Linklater, a Sam Shepard play to direct, a third novel to finish, and an endless array of other dreams waiting to be realized. In short, perfect timing to discuss his ongoing adventures in the dark forest.
Ethan Hawke. — Hey, Brian, is this you?
Brian Hendricks. — This is me, how you doing?
— I’m doing pretty well. I want to let you know that I read your interview with [Ralph Waldo] Emerson [Hobo #6] yesterday. That is such a fantastic piece. I couldn’t get over that. You gotta do more things like that.
— Well, I picked the whole idea of starting to do these posthumous interviews because I’m a bit of a quote fiend. Certainly Emerson, browsing through his stuff, I thought ‘this reads great as dialogue’. I felt like I had a great conversation with him.
— You did man! You did. It’s really going to make me go back and revisit him. I always forget how ahead of his time he was.
— My old secondhand copy of Emerson’s writings is never too far away because I find it’s the kind of book you can open anywhere and find something that is immediately profound and current.
— If you ever interview Emerson again, I really think you should ask him what it was like when he dug up his dead wife. I’d really like to know more about that. Have you ever heard that story? [Editor’s note: Ethan is referring to a journal entry wherein Emerson writes, “I visited Ellen’s tomb and opened the coffin.”]
— I do know the story and, yeah, reading the biography of Emerson reminds you that these guys left such a legacy of inspiration and perseverance and creative juice. His own life, I mean, his son died, his wife died, there was a lot of bad stuff going on around him. I guess his writing probably in the end elevated him above that.
— Yeah, you know, he lost several brothers, right?
— Yeah, exactly.
— Several brothers that were important to him. It goes to show you you don’t get something for nothing.
— I think in your own career as an actor and as a writer - certainly the Beats and Salinger, Joseph Campbell, the follow-your-bliss stuff - you must take that stuff pretty close to the heart in terms of your own journey.
— It’s funny, I hoard quotes as well, you know, things that inspire you. Those guys, all the ones that you’ve mentioned, have certainly been inspirations to me. Yesterday, for example, I did a Shakespeare play and a Chekhov play, both of them in a day here in London. What’s fascinating about it is going back in time, you know, getting a laugh on a line that somebody thought up four hundred years ago. To actually puncture the consciousness of an audience in 2009 with a four hundred-year-old idea and make them laugh with it? It’s an amazing feeling to be the vessel of that. The same is true with the more profound ideas of those plays. I’m thinking right now about quotes in the Emerson piece about the continuation of time and the continuation of all beings connected to each other. When you do the plays you feel it. You feel whatever it was like in 1904 in Russia right before the first failed revolution attempt, and this dialogue between Trofimov and Lopakhin, which is kind of the communist idealist and the practical capitalist skirting around each other, you feel how that conversation resonates now versus how that conversation resonated then.
— The beauty of it is to realize that things that were spoken four hundred years ago are even more modern than stuff that’s going on now.
— This happens to me sometimes, I’ll go see a Cassavetes film or a Godard film or some Fassbinder thing and you’ll realize that they’re still so unbelievably modern. There’s new age thinkers right now that feel like they’re breaking new ground that are really just treading old transcendental theories.
