Ethan Hawke talks to Christof Putzel

Christof Putzel: You play a father in a story that follows a child from his very young age to his late teen years while his family's going through divorce. Tell me about this. You really have a personal connection to something like this, don't you?

Ethan Hawke: Oh, I definitely do. I mean, what the movie centers on really is the one time in American life that your life is on a grid, you know? First grade through 12th grade — if you grow up in America, that is the little graph that everybody gets put on. Even if you get derailed from it, everything in your life is in relationship to what grade you're in. And so we were able to make this movie because all what we really had to do to anticipate 12 years was plan the parents' lives. And the kid's life would just happen kind of effortlessly — meaning, like every kid, they'll get dragged through their parents' lives, right?

Mapping out the parents' divorce, mapping out their following relationships and how those relationships impact the kids, you know? It was a real pleasure for me to get to use something that I know a lot about. I mean, I was a child of divorce. I've been through one as a parent. My daughter was 5, and so was I, actually, when my parents split up, I was 5 years old. And the movie starts at a kind of an interesting moment I think. It starts when the boy is 6, which is when a lot of us start remembering. When we start having some awareness of ourselves and connecting of one day to the next.

Previous to that, your life is kind of a dream. You you might remember something.  But it's so much more impressionistic than it is. I remember my first-grade teacher. That's where people start thinking and the kids don't even remember their parents' divorce. The movie opens and finds that it just kind of happened. And they're kind of wondering about it all. I know Richard Linklater, who made the film, and I, we both went through this. And that was our experience. By the time I was conscious, I had no memories of my parents being together.

And do you think that's the same case for your daughter?

Well, I know it is for my daughter and my son.

You've said before that you think that something really good can come of trying to exorcise your demons during your work. Do you think that that's something that you did in this case?

Well, I'm not the first person to say that. I mean, they teach acting in prisons, and they teach it in all kinds of therapy, whether it's painting or writing. People throughout history have tried to use creative expression to better understand themselves and better understand the world around them.

And how have you done that?

I think it would be a fun thing to do to show divorced couples this movie. Because one of the things that's really interesting to me about it is you really witness how both the parents love the kids and how that really is enough. That parents do make bad decisions all the time and a lot of times when there's acrimony and pain and suffering, people are quick to point blame or it's really easy. Because you want it not to be your fault. Just because somebody does something wrong or drops the ball in some fashion doesn't mean they're not capable of carrying the ball. And I think it can be a healing thing. 

From what I understand, you had quite a hard time after your divorce, and you found salvation in the theater. Is that correct?

Well, you use all these very dramatic words. “Salvation” and “demons” — those aren't my words. The theater has always been my first love. It's how I discovered acting, and there's something about it that is humble in a way that making movies is not humble.

Tell me about that.

When I make a movie like “Boyhood,” for example, I'm in partnership with Richard Linklater, and I'm trusting him to edit the performance the way that it ideally should be done. Now what's awesome about doing “Macbeth” or something, a really challenging piece on stage, is I'm in charge of the pacing of the evening.

If I think the audience needs to slow down and really hear this, I slow it down. If I think that this part is not that interesting, I can rattle my way through it and I can create. It's like being a musician.

And it seems like you've been able to take that quality to films like the “Before” series, where you just go. 

The “Before” series and “Boyhood,” all my collaborations with Richard Linklater — he’s extremely cinematic. It'd be a mistake to say that he was theatrical because we do long takes in the “Before” series. Some of them 14 minutes, 11 minutes, eight minutes. Really long. But they're not theatrical. They're oddly cinematic. Because theatrical implies a theatricality or an obvious storytelling, and what the magic of Rick is that there is no plot. I mean, the genius of “Boyhood” is in its absolute minutiae. It's interesting. The little, tiny moments that make up each day that we don't really pay attention to.

We think big moments define our lives. The same way we anticipate New Year's Eve is going to be fun and it kind of isn't fun. Really, the magic of a romantic life happens in some strange bus ride, something you can't anticipate.

Tell me a little more about “Boyhood” and how it came to be.

The amazing thing about “Boyhood” is that it really started about 13 years ago. “Training Day” had just come out. I just finished making, I think, my third movie with Richard. I'd done three or four. And he knew he wanted to make a movie about childhood, and he knew that there was kind of a lie in every movie about childhood, that your childhood could be boiled to one moment. Most movies, they all kind of boil it down to the time you won the football game and Dad told you he loved you or something and then it all came together. Whereas childhood is more of a series of moments that come to feel like one. And could we do that like literature could? And he had this idea of “What if I cast some boy? What if I found some great 6-year-old kid, he's just entering first grade and we made a movie over 12 years? And would you play the dad?” And I realized that he was offering me a job that an actor had never been offered before. He really wanted me to join him. He asked me to make a portrait of fatherhood. And here I was. I had a 5-year-old — or a 4-year-old — and a 1-year-old at the time. And fatherhood is the most important thing in my life. And so he's asking me to make a movie about this, the most important subject in my life. Fatherhood both as being a father and loving my own father. And trying to understand that father-son relationship.

And so I knew that's what he was asking me to do, and I knew this is incredibly unique. Now, did I think it would really happen? Probably not. I mean, we couldn't even sign contracts for this job, right? It's not legal to sign a kid up for something beyond seven years. Even a grownup can't sign anything for anything more. So the whole thing was this act of faith. All of us could've quit at any time. It was just this home project.

Did you have any hesitations about it?

None. I love Richard Linklater's movies. He's a great friend of mine, and I believe him, and I knew that the movie would be special. I didn't know how special until Ellar Coltrane showed up, the young man who's the star of the film. It's his spirit and energy that unites and galvanizes the film.

Did you actually feel like a father figure?

No, I feel like a friend. He has a father. He has a wonderful father, and in casting Ellar, you had to cast the parents, because his parents are beautiful people themselves. And they gave Ellar the tools he needed to kind of survive this experience.

Do you think there'll be another “Before” movie?

It's so fun to think about. I feel that they work as a trilogy and if there were to be any more of them, where we'd have to start work on, it really deals with the romantic life and what would the romantic life be like for the second half of your life. It feels more closed than it ever has before. If you'd asked me after “Before Sunset” if I thought there'd be a third, I would have said, "I'm hell bent that there is." And now I feel that the story might be finished in a way that I didn't.

I mean, if you watch all three “Before” [films], it covers what, 18 years? And what keeps surprising me is how much the same I am. Your face cracks and crumbles, and your body, your eyesight goes. But the spirit? Whatever the essence of who we are, there's some continuity there.

And I find that continuity really striking, and I think that depending on what you learn and how you handle your experiences, you either get better at letting that essence or that spirit — you either get better at letting it come out, or you get worse. A lot of people, as they get older, get more confused and more lost. And then a lot of people get wonderfully eccentric more and more. I kind of love that.

The New York Times said of you last year, “Mr. Hawke retains his purchases on boyishness in the movie. But he does seem a little different more than 15 years later. Maybe because he knows who he is.” That true?

I would never say I know who I am, because as soon as I walked out of this room, I'd fall flat on my face. You can't know who you are because you don't know what's going to happen to you today. The goal line is just always moving. So I understand my place better than I did when I was younger, and I've accepted my deficiencies. There's a funny quote about just because you're supposed to accept who are doesn't mean you're not supposed to keep changing. If my kids were here, they would be the first to point out to you all the different ways in which I need improving, and the more I learn about acting, the more I see my deficiencies. And that's kind of the wonderful thing about getting older, and the torture of it is when I was younger, I would do something, I'd think, “Oh, I did a really good job,” and I didn't really know all the ways in which I could have done better. I did well at what I knew how to do. But the game keeps changing, and it gets more involved. I now know how to help make other people better, and I didn't realize how I was hurting my co-stars or how stories could have been better. Simultaneously, I'm being asked to compromise at 44 in ways that I wasn't when I was 19. Things are harder. I have bills to pay. People rely on me. I have a credibility that I've gained that I don't want to lose. That creates fear, right? You know, when you're younger, who cares? I'd go on stage, I remember, and I wouldn't be nervous at all. And now I'm totally nervous.

And you had mentioned that the 40s feels so much different from your 30s. In your 30s, it was almost like you were trying to be in your 20s. Is that true?

I feel like, in my 30s, I felt really old because I felt like a really old young person. And now I feel like a really young old person, and I like that position better. And soon I'll just be an old old person, and that will probably be a drag.

In 2001 you played a very interesting character in “Training Day,” and you were nominated for an Oscar. This character starts off very green and throughout the film starts to submit a little bit to the corruption. Does that affect you when you watch the news these days? Events like Ferguson, Missouri? Do you see that through any different colors these days?

“Training Day” is a wonderful movie, and part of it uses the day as kind of a metaphor for a whole experience, and I think, for any of us who've turned 40, or how to maintain your idealism in the face of a world that is very compromising at every turn. It's kind of shocking, the racial divide in our country and how uncomfortable it still is to talk about. I think everybody wants it, I mean, I think why people shed tears when [Barack] Obama was elected … it feels like some racial divide is healing. I mean, we just feel that, well, this must mean it's healing.

And then something like the Ferguson case happens, and there's still so much suffering and so much dialogue happening in separate corners of the world. And that's just one small thing. I thought we left racial issues behind for class issues and issues of environment and issues of poverty, and there's huge issues that are the next generation's issues. Climate change is on the cover of the paper again today, and sometimes I think we're going look back at the traffic that I was in being late to this interview, while we were all talking about Ferguson, we weren't noticing that we were just eroding our planet. Meaning that it will make other issues seem small. If the whole world floods, we won't be as concerned with how we get along. But if we don't get along, it's not worth saving to begin with. So it's all important.

Do you touch on any of those issues in your films at all? Do you feel that you are making films that have some kind of social impact?

I don't believe in that. If I see a movie or a painting or a song that has an overt, political agenda with me, I somehow rebel against it. I like movies that tell the truth and you can make of the truth what you will. I think that there's something extremely political about the film “Boyhood,” not because it advocates a lefty or a righty point of view but it teaches you that every moment is precious and worth fighting for. I have family members that are in the military and are extremely right wing and extremely intelligent and argue with me about differing viewpoints. And I think it's one of the privileges of getting to be in a democracy. I made a movie this year about the drone strikes, “Good Kill,” that takes a very hard look at what drone warfare really means. People think the drones are kind of the least horrible option, the most pleasant way to kill people. Mostly because it means American soldiers aren't dying, and that is an extremely valuable thing to the U.S. military. But there's also an element of science fiction — what tools are you unlocking, and are you sure you want to unlock them, and what is the right way for them to be used? And so one could say that's political. But I'm not really even interested in the politics of that film as much as I'm interested in the humanity of it.

Because these drones also kill a lot of innocent people?

Yes. They do. It brings up interesting questions. The fact that we can assassinate people from anywhere in the world and it's not being policed. If we saw videos of every one of those deaths, if they showed them on TV, people would have a very different feeling about how nonviolent drones are.

You're playing a part like that — when you watch the news, do you see it any differently?

Oh, you have to, once you imagine yourself. But that's the beauty of acting. I could also play Gen. [George] Patton, and so I would then see his point of view. I always kind of feel that's why I don't really like movies that have a overt political agenda. Because if you have an agenda with people, you sometimes don't see the truth. You're so committed to a left-wing point of view or a right-wing point of view or you're so committed to your cause that you can't even hear what is really happening. And I think that job of the artistic community is to process whatever truth you can and tell it out in stories so that the rest of the community can have a dialogue and have a more honest dialogue.

You've made comments about LBGT in films and the social impact that they can have.

I think that if you look at where the community's relationship to lesbian and gay rights, where it stands for today versus when I started acting, it's really interesting. When I started acting, one of my first jobs was with River Phoenix. And River went on after “Stand By Me” to be a full-blown teen idol. I was so jealous. He was such a cool, studly guy, and he also happened to be wildly talented. And people can't believe what an act of courage it was for him to do “My Own Private Idaho.” This was a teen idol that women were in love with, and he went and played a young gay man in this movie. And I remember the acting community being like, “River's doing what? He can't do that.” Like, really? I mean, it was very brave. And now it's all over the place. Now nobody's defined by that. Lots of people play gay characters. One of the things that's interesting is Hollywood still hasn't gotten to the place where it does a big movie about gay people where they hire somebody who actually is gay, whether Mark Ruffalo is doing “Normal Heart” or Heath Ledger in “Brokeback Mountain.” It'll be a new step when we really let people who are openly out of the closet and gay tell their own story. That will be a nice moment.

Right after you had your breakout role in “Dead Poet's Society,” your mother encouraged you to get involved with a certain charity. Can you tell me about that?

Well, I was very fortunate, I had a really amazing, loving mother and loving father and loving brothers and sisters who looked after me. It's tough when you first experience celebrity, because all of the sudden it changes people's relationship to you. Girls in high school who didn't think you were cute all of the sudden think you're cute. I mean, that's a small, obvious way. But it has other implications, and one of them was that I had a little bit of money in the bank. I'd made, I think, $30,000 off “Dead Poet's Society,” and I was the richest person I knew. But my mother really quickly took my eye away from buying things with it and being frivolous with it and [to] thinking about in what ways I could take responsibility for my own education, in what ways I could see myself as a member of a community. Meaning, what percentage of that did I think should be given away? Was it really all to my credit that I got this job? Wasn't there a large community that made that happen for me? If people don't go to the movies, I don't have a job. If people don't make the movies, if I wasn't hired, if there weren't casting directors. So I can't claim ownership of all that money.

It's very humbling to experience that when you're 18.

It sure is. I mean, they're just kind of old-fashioned values. My mother now works in Bucharest, Romania. She works for gypsy rights now. So my mother's also a little crazy. She took me to Haiti shortly after the [Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”] Duvalier revolution. She was worried I was going to be a spoiled brat and not see how complicated the world was. She was an old-fashioned do-gooder. A little Eleanor Roosevelt type.

Are you still involved with some of the work she's doing?

Sure. I got involved right after “Dead Poet's Society” … with an organization called the Doe Fund, which is a tremendous success of getting men who are in prison and men who are homeless, if they are sober, they can put their life back together, and it gives them work and a plan to have a bank account and pay your rent. And kind of become a functioning member of society again. Get back in touch with their kids. Get back in touch with their ex-wives. All the tough stuff that keeps people from staying sober.

This interview has been edited and condensed.