Ethan Hawke is a guy who, for better of worse, almost always follows his feelings, because his attachment to them is the strongest and truest thing he knows. He follows them with regards to the professional choices he makes, and he follows them in his personal life as well. In recent interviews, he’s talked some about the darker side of those feelings, and been more forthcoming about the stress and insecurity brought about by his wife Uma Thurman’s career eclipsing his, and how this fed frictions and fissures already inherent to the relationship, which ended in divorce in 2004.
Night at the Museum, and who — up until 2001’s Training Day, for which he received an Oscar nomination, and arguably only after that, with Taking Lives and 2005’s remake of Assault on Precinct 13 — never particularly seemed to take a studio job just as a commercial “gimme putt.” But then, Hawke has always seemingly been a restless spirit, full of contradictions. That much can be gleaned by how a high-intellect ambivalence and uncertainty fuel his most memorable screen characters, whether as slacker Troy Dyer in Reality Bites, a panicked police recruit in Training Day or the smitten Jesse, in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.
It’s hard to say, then, exactly what feelings the relatively chilly theatrical reception of Hawke’s sophomore directorial effort, The Hottest State, based on his own novel, will elicit in him. It is obviously of him, and thus personal and valued, but to hear Hawke tell it, the film wasn’t something he particularly tackled with wide-eyed preciousness. “It just kind of rolled out. I have to say this project happened incredibly organically,” he says.
“When I was younger, when I first wrote the book, I was really just running with that ‘write what you know’ thing they tell you in writing class,” Hawke continues. “I was using the details of my real life to create authenticity for an emotional subject matter that I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about how much we take, how much our parents give us the vocabulary for love and how much we’re guided by that and how much that comes out in our romantic relationships. I kind of wanted to find that intersection, you know — the hottest state, an elevated level of passion, and where the protagonist comes from. That’s what I wanted to write about, so I just kind of stole pieces from my own life and from my friends’ lives and just did it.”
But now, Hawke says, The Hottest State feels like somebody else’s life. It is no longer a reflection of his day-to-day, one that encompasses two kids, a divorce and the itinerant rhythms of an acting career. “What was kind of neat, what I feel proud of about The Hottest State, the novel, is that I wrote it when I was so young that it’s not nostalgic at all,” Hawke explains. “You know normally a lot of stories about youth and romantic first love and stuff — (Ivan) Turgenev’s First Love or even (Anton) Chevkov’s The Seagull, when he writes about the young lovers — it’s done with the eye and maturity of an older person kind of mocking it or laughing at it. I wrote it as if it was really important.” Here Hawke lets out a little laugh. “And then with the movie, I felt like I could do a little combination of both.” For the full feature piece interview, from FilmStew, click here.
Ethan Hawke is either going to really grow into and look good with what’s called “an interesting face,” or be one terribly ugly mo-fo.