Actor and director Ethan Hawke cannot be pigeon-holed. Well-known for his collaborations with director Richard Linklater — including the Before trilogy and Boyhood — he’s also appeared as rookie police officer Jake Hoyt in the drama Training Day (for which he received an Oscar nod), questioning minister Ernst Toller in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, and prep school student Todd Anderson in the Peter Weir directed Dead Poets Society. Troy Dyer, his character in the 1994 twenty-something slice-of-life comedy Reality Bites, is often cited as a shorthand for a definitional type of Gen X slacker dude. As director, Hawke helmed the recent documentary The Last Movie Stars — an in depth examination of the lives and work of husband/wife duo Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. And now he’s directed the film Wildcat about novelist Flannery O’Connor, which stars his daughter Maya Hawke as the struggling writer.
Hawke tells The Treatment about the thrill of directing his daughter as well as Cooper Hoffman, son of the late actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who was a close friend of Hawke’s. He also tells us why he used horror film motifs in the film and how his experience of working with the “mystic” director Peter Weir early in his career was unforgettable.