IN THE SPOTLIGHT A movie star despite himself By Nancy Mills Friday, June 15, 2012

RECENT RELEASE: Hawke with Kristin Scott Thomas in The Woman in the Fifth

1/3 A professional actor at 12, the now 40-year-old Ethan Hawke talks about ageing and the disadvantages of starting young Ethan Hawke never met Tennessee Williams, his first cousin twice removed. However, he likes to quote what the legendary playwright had to say about becoming an adult a subject that has been consuming the actor since he turned 40 last year. Tennessee Williams wrote, Ageing is not for the timid. Its for the bold, Hawke says, speaking by telephone from his home in New York. If you cant make that turn, the world humiliates you. I feel I have made the turn. My kids made me. He has four children, including 13-year-old Maya and 10-year-old Roan with his first wife, actress Uma Thurman, and three-year-old Clementine and 11-month-old Indiana with his second wife, actress Ryan Shawhughes-Hawke. How do you have a great second act? Hawke asks. It seems like a whole lot of thought is given to how we prepare for the first part of our lives, and not a lot to how we grow and evolve after 40. So much focus is put on not losing your hair and not getting a fat (bottom). Money starts to be the only barometer people have for proving that theyre amounting to anything but thats a false god. Hawke, who constantly shifts his attention from acting to directing to writing, seldom looks for big paydays. If he did, he certainly wouldnt have signed on for the leading

role in The Woman in the Fifth, an independent film shot in French, English and Polish. Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, it is scheduled to open in the United States on June 15 and is sure to leave a fair percentage of its audience in confusion. Are you still scratching your head after seeing it? Hawke asks. The Woman in the Fifth, which he compares to David Lynchs Mulholland Dr. (2001) and Roman Polanskis The Tenant (1976), definitely asks more questions than it answers. Hawke plays Tom, a college lecturer and sometime novelist who moves to Paris to be near his six-year-old daughter, Chloe. His ex-wife has obtained a restraining order against him, so Tom can only catch glimpses of Chloe. He communicates by writing her long letters. Forced to take a job in an unsavoury warehouse to pay his bills, Tom develops relationships with a Polish barmaid (Joanna Kulig) and a Hungarian/French translator (Kristin Scott Thomas). When people around him start turning up dead, however, the police insist that he couldnt have been with Scott Thomas character because she has been dead for two decades. Tom wonders if he is going mad. I felt I was working on a 1960s Czech art film, Hawke says. It was very creative and intensely unconventional. The Woman in the Fifth proved to be a good segue into Hawkes Act 2. Ive always been the youngest at everything, he says. I was 17 when I made Dead Poets Society (1989). I always looked at myself as a student. Its interesting to be older than some of the directors youre working for. He also had another realisation. Very few movies are made that a 22-year-old cant grasp, he says. This profession is a young persons medium, and theyre actively begging you not to grow up. Family responsibilities have changed his perspective, Hawke admits. Because of the kids, Im crazily busy, he says. Im trying to have the artistic life of my dreams while meeting my responsibilities as a parent. Each of my kids needs something different from me. I love them all, and theyre the wellspring of my life, but theyve definitely slowed me down. A few weeks ago Hawke found himself in the unusual role of side man, playing backup guitar for Maya, who was singing at the New York club Jones Street. She loves the arts as much as her mother and father, Hawke says, sounding both proud and protective. My goal as a father is to help her have a successful life in the arts and not fall prey to all the weirdnesses that happen. Many show-business parents discourage their children from pursuing careers in the arts, but Hawke who made his professional stage debut in Shaws St. Joan in 1983 and his film debut in Explorers (1985) isnt taking that tack with Maya. He would rather, however, that she started her career later in life. I love going to the movies or a play

with her and hearing her take on the world, he says. Its fascinating, but I wouldnt advise anyone to become a professional until theyre an adult. Im in a funny position, he admits, because I did my first professional play at 12. I made my first movie at 13. I was very much like Maya is I saw that world and knew that I wanted to be part of it. But there are huge disadvantages when you start so young. Hawke considers himself lucky to have escaped the worst of it. I did my first movie with River Phoenix, he says, referring to the actor who died of a drug overdose in 1993 at 23. Sadly no one will be interviewing him today. Its a highway littered with corpses, and not just literal corpses. There are a lot of wonderfully gifted young people who get burnt out before they even develop. One of the things that saved Hawke, according to him, was the realisation that he didnt care what the public thought of him. His motto always has been, I just want to have an interesting life. The only child of two college students who split up when he was three, Hawke never aspired to a quiet, comfortable, conventional life. I could see that the ordinary path led to a pretty ordinary, lousy place, he says. I tried to carve out something different for myself. I feel so sorry for young people who feel the pressure of public opinion, the actor adds. You have to put your blinders on and just work. If Elvis Presley had stopped singing his songs because everybody told him it was gross that he shook his pelvis like that, the world would be much lesser. A key moment came when he was only 21, Hawke recalls. I was on Broadway doing The Seagull (1992), and I knew in my heart that Id never learned so much in my life. I got the worst reviews. It was one of those moments where I thought, If Im going to quit, or think this experience wasnt worthwhile, because people want to write nasty things about me, then I must not be very serious. If you can handle these situations well, they can make you wiser. In a 27-year career, Hawke has made more than 40 movies, including Reality Bites (1994), Gattaca (1997), Hamlet (2000) and Before the Devil Knows Youre Dead (2007). With three new films awaiting release, he clearly isnt slowing down. Vigilandia is a science-fiction thriller co-starring Lena Headey, while Sinister is a horror movie. Hawke also has what he calls an extended cameo in the new Total Recall. As usual, though, acting in movies is only the tip of Hawkes iceberg. Hes also directing a documentary about piano maestro Seymour Bernstein, and this fall will star in and direct Clive, an Off-Broadway production about a self-destructive musician. Hes

scheduled to star in an Off-Broadway production of Anton Chekhovs Ivanov, and is also part of director Richard Linklaters 12-year film project Boyhood. He seems to do everything he can to avoid being a movie star, but nonetheless Hawke is one, which he attributes at least in part to his Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his work in the crime drama film Training Day (2001), co-starring Denzel Washington. It changed my career because the world respects that kind of thing, says Hawke, not himself sounding impressed. Its great to be in a hit movie, but, to be honest, when I have so many friends who are such exceptional actors, it makes me feel lame to be talked about for that kind of honour. Because actors arent supposed to write, the Oscar nomination I got as a writer for Before Sunset (2004) really helped me, he adds. It lightened the load of that stigma. Along the way, Hawke admits, hes made a few movies that hed rather not have made. Its very difficult to act in movies for as long as I have and not make a ton of bad movies, he says. I really dont like making bad movies. I try to stay really busy so that I become more discerning about scripts. Thats why I work in the theatre so much and try to write, Hawke says. A bored actor finds any script interesting.

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