- 7 weeks ago
Ethan Hawke takes us through his celebrated and dynamic career, discussing his roles in 'Dead Poets Society,' 'Before Sunrise,' 'Training Day,' 'Before The Devil Knows Your Dead,' 'Boyhood,' 'First Reformed' and more.
FX's The Lowdown airs Tuesdays at 9pm ET/PT on FX, next day on Hulu.
Director: Adam Lance Garcia
Director of Photography: Bradley Wickham
Editor: Alex Mechanik; Alana McNair
Talent: Ethan Hawke
Producer: Madison Coffey
Line Producer: Natasha Soto-Albors
Associate Producer: Lyla Neely
Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi
Associate Production Manager: Elizabeth Hymes
Talent Booker: Mica Medoff
Camera Operator: Carlos Araujo
Gaffer: David Djaco
Audio Engineer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Owen Wright; Shanti Cuizon-Burden
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
FX's The Lowdown airs Tuesdays at 9pm ET/PT on FX, next day on Hulu.
Director: Adam Lance Garcia
Director of Photography: Bradley Wickham
Editor: Alex Mechanik; Alana McNair
Talent: Ethan Hawke
Producer: Madison Coffey
Line Producer: Natasha Soto-Albors
Associate Producer: Lyla Neely
Production Manager: Andressa Pelachi
Associate Production Manager: Elizabeth Hymes
Talent Booker: Mica Medoff
Camera Operator: Carlos Araujo
Gaffer: David Djaco
Audio Engineer: Sean Paulsen
Production Assistant: Owen Wright; Shanti Cuizon-Burden
Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin
Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo
Assistant Editor: Andy Morell
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00When we were first friends, I was a star,
00:02and he was a reader, and he was in acting class
00:06with some friends of mine,
00:07and now he was Academy Award-winning
00:08Philip Seymour Hoffman.
00:10The power dynamic had shifted,
00:12and Sidney Lumet fanned the flames of it.
00:14I'd come in in the morning, and Sidney would say,
00:17I saw Daly's last night.
00:18Phil is so good.
00:20Not since Marlon Brando have I seen work like that.
00:23At wrap of the movie, I went up to Phil,
00:26and I said, this has been a great experience,
00:29but I'm so glad it's over,
00:30because if I had to hear one more time
00:32from that old dog that not since Marlon Brando,
00:36have I seen work like this?
00:38And Phil goes, he said that to you.
00:40He said that to me every day about you.
00:42And we walked over to Sidney, and we said, you told us both.
00:45The other one was like Marlon Brando.
00:46He's like, eh, you guys are so easy to play.
00:49It's unbelievable.
00:54Hello, my name's Ethan Hawke,
00:56and this is the timeline of my career.
00:59I get it.
01:00Your people have been visiting our planet for,
01:02well, since ancient times.
01:05And now you've come back to check up on us.
01:07And explain everything, right?
01:09It's a very interesting story.
01:11Anybody who's interested in going to this career
01:13should know that it's extremely painful.
01:15I remember River Phoenix and I went to the premiere
01:18of The Explorers at the Ziegfeld movie theater.
01:21This was a big deal.
01:22Ziegfeld was huge.
01:23It was just this massive movie theater,
01:25and the expectations in that movie were giant.
01:28Joe Dante's previous film had been Gremlins,
01:31which would have been just huge.
01:34They'd spent $30 million in the movie in 1984.
01:36That's like a $100 million movie or something.
01:38It was a big deal.
01:39River and I were so excited, and we went to the bathroom afterwards.
01:42And, you know, in the years since it had come out, we changed.
01:44We didn't look the same as we did.
01:46I mean, people were just talking about how bad the movie was
01:48right with us, right there at the urinal.
01:50I heard somebody say, well, America's voted,
01:54and Ethan Hawke is not a movie star.
01:56Now, I was 14.
01:57It seems like an awfully cruel...
01:59For the votes to be in at 14, that doesn't seem fair.
02:02But it was a great lesson about expectation
02:08and about why are you doing something.
02:09And if you're doing it to be a big shot, you're going to be humiliated.
02:13But if you're doing it because you love it, they can humiliate you.
02:16My name is Steven Meeks.
02:17Oh, this is Todd Anderson.
02:19Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
02:21Charlie Dalton.
02:25Knox Overstreet.
02:26Todd's brother was Jeffrey Anderson.
02:28Oh, yeah, sure.
02:30Peter was, for lack of a better word, he is...
02:34And I mean this in the best sense of the word.
02:35There's something mystical about him.
02:37He was a true master craftsman.
02:39He thought about making movies with real discipline.
02:43And I'm watching him direct Robin Williams.
02:45Not an easy thing to do because Robin is a comic genius,
02:48but dramatic acting was still new to Robin at that time.
02:52And watching that relationship, like, in the room.
02:56I was four feet away while they're talking about performance.
03:00And that was something you don't unsee.
03:04Oh, captain, my captain.
03:07Who knows where that comes from?
03:10Anybody.
03:16Not a clue.
03:18It's from a poem by Walt Whitman about Mr. Abraham Lincoln.
03:23Now, in this class, you can either call me Mr. Keating,
03:26or if you're slightly more daring, oh, captain, my captain.
03:30Robin Williams didn't do the script.
03:33And I didn't know you could do that.
03:36If he had an idea, he just did it.
03:38He didn't ask permission.
03:40And that was a new door that was open to my brain,
03:44that you could play like that.
03:46And Peter liked it, as long as we still achieved the same goals that the script had.
03:52They had a very different way of working,
03:55but they didn't judge one another or resist one another.
03:58They worked with each other.
04:00That's exciting.
04:01That's when you get at the stuff of what great collaboration can do,
04:04is that you don't have to be the same,
04:07but you don't have to hate somebody for being different than you are.
04:10And then the collective imagination can become very, very powerful,
04:14because the movie becomes bigger than one person's point of view.
04:16It's containing multiple perspectives.
04:21Do you have any idea what they were arguing about?
04:25Do you speak English?
04:26Yeah.
04:28No, I'm sorry.
04:29My German is not very good.
04:35Have you ever heard that as couples get older,
04:38they lose their ability to hear each other?
04:40No.
04:41Well, supposedly, men lose their ability to hear higher pitch sounds,
04:46and women eventually lose hearing on the low end.
04:49I first met Richard Linklater when I went to see Slacker.
04:52We're talking about, you know, 1990, 1991.
04:56And I was becoming an adult, and this was a new voice.
05:01It was like a voice that felt like it was my generation.
05:03It was like it wasn't copying old people's movies.
05:06It wasn't trying to be Hollywood.
05:07It was somebody communicating with me and my generation.
05:11It was a movie that I'd thought about making.
05:13I think a lot of us had thought about making something like that.
05:17But he did it.
05:17So I was very interested in him.
05:19He was from Austin, and I was from Austin.
05:21I was like, who is this guy?
05:22And then I was starting a theater company,
05:24and we were doing a play called Sophistry by Jonathan Mark Sherman.
05:27And Anthony Rapp was in it.
05:29And so Anthony Rapp invited us to a rough cut of Dazed and Confused.
05:33When I saw Dazed and Confused, I thought that there is a great injustice in the universe that just
05:37occurred because I was supposed to be in that movie.
05:40I wanted to be in that movie.
05:42I didn't understand why I wasn't in that movie.
05:43And then I heard a couple weeks later that the director of that movie,
05:47the director of Slacker, this guy Richard Linklater, was coming to see our play.
05:50He came and we all went out to dinner afterwards.
05:53A dinner.
05:54We didn't eat.
05:55You know, we drank.
05:56Till like four in the morning, I just talked to this guy.
05:59He brought up that night this idea for a film he had called Before Sunrise.
06:03And that's how our friendship started.
06:05I want to keep talking to you.
06:06You know, I have no idea what your situation is.
06:09But, uh, but I feel like we have some kind of, uh, connection, right?
06:15Yeah, me too.
06:16Yeah, right.
06:16Well, great.
06:17So listen, here's the deal.
06:18This is what we should do.
06:19You should get off the train with me here in Vienna and come check out the town.
06:22What?
06:22Come on, it'll be fun.
06:24What would we do?
06:26I don't know.
06:26All I know is I have to catch an Austrian Airlines flight tomorrow morning at 930.
06:31And I don't really have enough money for a hotel.
06:32So I was just going to walk around and it'd be a lot more fun if you came with me.
06:36And if I turn out to be some kind of psycho, you know, you just get on the next train.
06:40That movie is two people.
06:41And it's a movie about the connection between what can happen when a man and a woman really connect emotionally.
06:48You know, what is real intimacy?
06:51Real intimacy.
06:52And he knew he wanted to build that movie around the two actors.
06:55I mean, he would probably tell you if he didn't find the right two people, I'm not sure he was going to make that movie.
06:59You know, he was hunting for co-conspirators.
07:02I was doing the auditions and then I got paired with Julie Delpy.
07:07And I don't think I'd ever felt so stupid in my life.
07:11It was incredibly humbling.
07:13She was 21 and seemed like the stuff of a Tolstoy novel or something.
07:18You know, I mean, she was deep and wild and mercurial.
07:22And, you know, I felt like a dumb American.
07:25You know, I just felt like a nimrod.
07:28And somehow Rick liked that combination and cast us both.
07:32And then we worked on those movies for 20 years.
07:36And we're not going to call right or no.
07:38It's depressing.
07:39Yeah. Okay.
07:39All right.
07:42All right.
07:43Your train's going to leave.
07:44Say goodbye.
07:47Bye.
07:49Goodbye.
07:51Over.
07:54Later.
07:54One of the things that I think makes those movies special as romantic films is they feel genderless.
08:08A lot of romantic movies feel like it's made with a male gaze or it feels like it's made with a female gaze.
08:13And Rick's peculiar genius on those movies is it doesn't have a gender-based gaze.
08:20It's not Jesse's movie.
08:21It's not Celine's movie.
08:22He's really using us to create the characters,
08:25to create a landscape where you can actually see them both,
08:29like a scientist might see them.
08:31And it makes it really interesting.
08:33We got interested in revisiting those characters as they aged because life gets more complex.
08:39Could we sustain those complexities?
08:42What do you think we're going to do?
08:44Roll up in the black and white, huh?
08:45Slap the cuffs on them.
08:46You're under arrest.
08:48That's a high roller, dog.
08:52Take the money.
08:54I mean, I already told you I'm not going to take that.
08:56Just take the money.
08:56I'm not going to take that.
08:57Okay, don't.
08:58Just burn it, barbecue it, fish fry it.
09:00I don't give a fuck, but the boys will feel better.
09:02But fuck their feelings.
09:03Denzel is one of a kind, one of a generation.
09:07It's kind of like playing rhythm guitar really well to let somebody solo.
09:12Like you can screw up the rhythm.
09:14You can screw it up.
09:15The only reason this guy's not going to win the Academy Award for this movie is if I screw it up.
09:18So I had to be present and use everything I've learned.
09:22And Antoine Fuqua is a wonderful director and he loves authenticity.
09:27And he loves things that smell right.
09:29Does it feel lived in?
09:31Does it feel real?
09:32What am I photographing?
09:33And he just gave us a world.
09:35And if your game, you know, Denzel's imagination is so powerful that he's going to bring you
09:43into an imaginative universe where you don't know what's going to happen.
09:47You can just live it.
09:48And those lines between, are we improvising?
09:52Are these lines of dialogue?
09:54What's happening here?
09:55Get really unclear and it gets really exciting.
09:57Move real slow.
09:58Keep your hands where I can see them.
09:59I want you to put that money in that bag.
10:01Take your weapons and place them inside that pillowcase right there.
10:05There's a few films that changed my career.
10:28You know, the first, most obvious one is Dead Poets Society because all these things opened up.
10:32But Training Day taught me that you can make a mainstream Hollywood movie and it can be great.
10:36I was in my 20s and I had a kind of more punk rock spirit about everything that was successful,
10:42was phony.
10:42And with Denzel, I realized, oh, wait a second.
10:45This can be done.
10:47You can make meaningful cinema in Hollywood.
10:50You have to be really good.
10:52And so opportunities changed for me dramatically after Training Day.
10:56Did you touch anything?
10:58I don't think so.
10:59You don't think so?
11:00I don't think so!
11:01No!
11:02No!
11:03I didn't!
11:03I didn't touch anything!
11:04You think!
11:05I don't touch anything!
11:06I don't like this, Andy!
11:07I don't like this!
11:08Shut up!
11:13Did you touch anything?
11:14No.
11:16Are we good?
11:19Let's go.
11:20Sidney Lumet didn't just direct Dog the Afternoon.
11:22He directed Marlon Brando in Tennessee Williams, The Fugitive Kind.
11:26Like he directed Serpico.
11:28He directed Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men.
11:30He directed Network.
11:32One of my favorite, Nick Nolte in Q&A is like this incredible performance.
11:36Even his lesser known films have the stuff of greatness in them.
11:40So I had been friends with Philip Seymour Hoffman for years and
11:44Phil brought Sidney to see me in a play.
11:47I was doing Hurley Burley.
11:49That's where I met Sidney.
11:50And then I got a call the next day.
11:54Phil was like, yeah, Sidney wants to talk to you.
11:56He's good.
11:56Read the script.
11:56Read the script.
11:57How did it feel being cast by him?
11:58It felt great.
12:00It felt like the way a pro baseball player might feel if all of a sudden
12:09the Yankees want to sign you or something.
12:10They're like, wait, I'm going to play for the Yankees.
12:14You say it again, I'm in.
12:15What are you talking about?
12:17You say it again, I'm in.
12:18I'm in!
12:20What the hell?
12:26I just wanted to see if you're pointing at that chicken chip baby stuff like when we were kids.
12:29You know, it doesn't count.
12:30I'm in, fingers crossed.
12:31I'm in.
12:31Phil was great.
12:33And by that, I mean, he didn't suffer fools lightly.
12:36He was one of those people that it just felt life and death to him, whether or not we did the scene well.
12:45The stakes were very high for him.
12:48And it could be scary.
12:50I remember once we were rehearsing and it's really, it's when I found the character.
12:56It's going to sound mean, I think, but it wasn't mean.
13:00We were rehearsing and I was, I don't know, pouring some coffee and a break.
13:04I just have no idea who this guy is.
13:08And Phil said, you want to know why?
13:10I'm like, why?
13:12He goes, because you keep trying to play alpha and I'm the alpha.
13:18Stop it.
13:19I was like, and for some reason it all just clicked.
13:25It's like he started a dynamic between the two of us that was right.
13:31Power and status in brothers, in society, it's all, it all plays a game.
13:37And you know, when we were first friends, I was a star and he was a reader and he was
13:44in acting class with some friends of mine, but I was already starring in movies, right?
13:48And now he was Academy Award winning Philip Seymour Hoffman.
13:51And he's casting me.
13:54You know, the power dynamic had shifted and I wasn't letting it shift.
13:59And there's a similar air between Andy and, and, uh, and Hank.
14:04And Sidney Lumet fanned the flames of it.
14:07I'd come in in the morning and Sidney would say, I saw Daly's last night.
14:13Phil is so good.
14:15He's so good.
14:16I said, that scene you guys are doing it.
14:18You know, he's not since Marlon Brando.
14:22Have I seen work like that?
14:24And I'd be like, oh, great, great.
14:26And, and my stuff was, was, was, oh yeah, yeah, it was fun.
14:29Just, I mean, it must, it must be a real honor to work with him.
14:33I'm like, yeah, it is.
14:34It's a real honor.
14:36At wrap of the movie, I went up to Phil and I said, um, you know, this has been a great experience,
14:43but I'm so glad it's over.
14:45I said, because if I had to hear one more time from that old dog that not since Marlon Brando,
14:52have I seen work like this?
14:53And Phil goes, he said that to you.
14:56And I was like, yeah, he said that to me every day about you.
14:59And, and we walked over to Sidney and we said, you told us both.
15:04The other one was like Marlon Brando.
15:05He's like, eh, you guys are so easy to play.
15:08It's unbelievable.
15:09You found this at Dripping Springs?
15:11Uh-huh.
15:12Wow.
15:13What else you got?
15:14Well, um, these are snake vertebrae.
15:17Snake vertebrae?
15:17That's disgusting.
15:19Huh?
15:20Mason, I don't want you collecting snake vertebrae anymore.
15:23Is this the feather I sent you?
15:24Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is.
15:25Oh, dad, um, I forgot to show you these, um, these basketball pictures.
15:30You're on a basketball team?
15:32Yeah.
15:33Wow.
15:34Well, for me, it was absolutely incredible.
15:36I can't wax poetic enough about it.
15:38Linklater came to visit me, um, right after my son was born.
15:42And he told me that he really wanted to make a movie about childhood,
15:44but he thought that every coming of age story had a little lie to it,
15:48which is that you come of age at one moment.
15:50Even the great ones like 400 blows or something.
15:53There's not a moment a human being comes of age.
15:56It's a series of moments that collect.
15:59And he was like, I really want to do a movie that basically,
16:02I want to do it over 12 years, first grade through 12th grade.
16:05It's like most of us, our first memory is somewhere right around first grade,
16:10five or six.
16:10As an American, you know, that's the grid that almost all of us live on.
16:14You know, 12th grade, then our lives kind of become our own.
16:18He's like, I want to make a movie about that grid.
16:20It's going to be 12 short films.
16:22And I remember just saying, this is an incredible idea.
16:25But it's basically illegal.
16:27You know, we couldn't sign a contract.
16:28You can't sign anything for over seven years.
16:31You know, so like it's a handshake deal, even with the little kids.
16:35You know, the kids could have quit anytime they wanted to.
16:38At first, it felt like playing in a band at your friend's house
16:43for about five or six years.
16:44And then once we'd done it for six, seven, eight years,
16:48we all started to really believe in it.
16:50Because it was incredible what was happening.
16:52By the time it was over, it felt like it was a part of the fabric of our lives.
16:57We had decade-long memories of making this movie.
17:00You know, it was wild.
17:02Oh, come on, Jimmy, man.
17:03You knew the kids were coming this weekend.
17:05You could just help me out a little bit.
17:07Just...
17:07I'm sorry, muffin.
17:08Yeah, don't muffin me, all right?
17:10Don't put me in that position.
17:11I don't know your fucking Tony Randall.
17:13One of the things about Boyhood that was so hard is that
17:16I'm all the time being put in scenes with people who weren't really actors, right?
17:19They're just kids.
17:20They're real.
17:21They're just living and behaving.
17:22And so, again, this exercise in non-acting becomes the game.
17:28Because if I start acting with these kids who are really just talking about Pineapple Express
17:32or whatever, I just look like a big phony knucklehead.
17:34So I had to really be present with them.
17:36And it was thrilling.
17:37And it was thrilling to watch them grow up and start to have more agency
17:40and what they wanted their characters to care about and say and think about.
17:44And of course, I was growing as a dad.
17:46You know, my kids were growing up and I was able to use what I'd learned from that experience
17:51as a parent and put that into the movie.
17:53You're not an actor.
17:54Neither are you.
17:55Oh, that's true.
17:58I had prepped and worked on a movie with Rick years ago, like at Chet Baker at 24, 25.
18:05So Boy to Be Blue felt like I was making a sequel to a movie I never made.
18:10You know, 15 years before or whatever, I'd prepped this movie to where I was
18:14learning the trumpet and thinking about Chet and all this stuff, reading books about Chet Baker.
18:19And now all of a sudden, here I was 40 and being asked to revisit this character.
18:23A very, very interesting moment to meet him, which is after he'd been beaten up really badly
18:28and he lost his teeth.
18:29And for most trumpeters, if you lose your teeth, it's over.
18:34And Chet Baker did a remarkable thing, which is he just taught himself to play the
18:38trumpet over again.
18:40He had to use his mouth in a totally different way than he ever had before.
18:44And he did it.
18:45And he put himself back together.
18:47And of course, it was a great opportunity for him to become sober, which he did not take.
18:54What I loved about the movie is it's like, it's the perfect definition of bittersweet,
18:59which is that it's a real victory, which is that he learns to play again.
19:04And it's a real defeat because, you know, the same trappings that existed when he first played
19:12still existed and he fell into the same trap again.
19:15Sorry, Reverend Toler didn't understand the implications.
19:21May I ask a question?
19:22Yeah, go ahead.
19:22Will God forgive us?
19:28Will God forgive us for what we're doing to his creation?
19:30That's what Manzana asked me when I visited him.
19:35There's been a lot of loose talk about environmental change.
19:38There's scientific consensus, 97%.
19:41The thing I'll first say about First Reformed is it's probably the best script I ever read.
19:47It was just finished.
19:49It was the script itself was a finished work of art.
19:52I remember saying to my wife, like, I'll make this movie on a phone.
19:55And I think Paul felt very deeply the crisis that we all feel about what's happening with our
19:59environment.
20:00How can we do anything about it?
20:01And how can we be a better person?
20:04What good is our faith if it doesn't make us better citizens?
20:07And, you know, all these really, really sophisticated questions.
20:11I know some things about it that I'm not sure helpful to say.
20:33But I think that that ending is a cinematic expression of a thought that is articulated earlier
20:46in the film was that wisdom is holding two opposing thoughts at the same time.
20:53And that that shot is an attempt at the continuity of opposites.
20:59Like, how do you express it?
21:00It's real.
21:02It's not real.
21:04He's dead.
21:06He's finding life for the first time.
21:10It's a symbol.
21:11So to answer it is to rob it of its power.
21:16The thing that I know is how much thought Paul put into that, and that I read multiple drafts
21:24with multiple endings, and I watched him arrive at that as the right ending.
21:30And I found it incredibly satisfying.
21:33It does exactly what Paul, like, even if you don't like it, it's doing what he wants to do.
21:39So it's fine.
21:40And I know Paul has said before that a great movie starts as you walk out of the theater
21:47after it was over.
21:48A great film should be like a bell.
21:51And it's not the ringing of the bell that's important.
21:53It's the vibration and what it awakens in you that's significant.
21:58And so the end of that movie is a bell ringing, and it's designed to walk you out of the theater,
22:04thinking about the themes of the film, rather than finishing a story.
22:09I say to not assert yourself for the rights of the oppressed is to fall down and worship
22:18at the moloch of despotism.
22:20Yes sir, we hate you.
22:21That's right.
22:22We must, we must join together and form an anti-slavery movement.
22:29Black folks, white folks working together, committed for the violence necessary to end slavery.
22:37James McBride, who wrote the book The Good Lord Bird, is one of the kindest, wisest, funniest,
22:45deepest artists I've ever met.
22:49And I admire him wildly.
22:50And there's a lot of James McBride in that character.
22:54And John Brown, a lot of things are said about him, but I just admired him.
23:02I admired John Brown, and I admired his faith, and I admired the courage of his convictions.
23:07And we were doing it right in the time period when, oh, there's a lot of, you know, warring
23:13thought about whether these statues from the Civil War should come down.
23:16And then they came down, and now people are putting them back up.
23:19And you know, all the kind of madness that is the United States relationship with its past.
23:25It was a limited series.
23:26So I got to play the character for eight hours of film, which was just months and months and
23:30months of playing him.
23:31I think so many of us feel inert and inept, and that we can't do anything about injustice in the world.
23:39And to get to play a character who's like, damn it, I'm going to go down swinging.
23:43I'm pulling the sock out of my mouth, you know, and just admired it.
23:48And the fact that McBride, the way McBride tells the story of John Brown is with so much wit and humor
23:55and love.
23:56It's a lot like if Red Fox or Richard Pryor told you the story of John Brown.
24:01It's not self-serious.
24:02It's not maudlin.
24:04It's talking about great, great pain and suffering.
24:07And does it, you know, laughing its ass off the whole way.
24:11So it's complicated.
24:12And I just loved it.
24:14And I do also think, sidebars, the pandemic happened right after it.
24:18So I was left, I played that part and then went into the oblivion.
24:25You know, I just, I felt like I wanted to go back to the set when there was no pandemic.
24:30I am a Tulsa true story.
24:34A truth story.
24:35What exactly is a true story?
24:37I'm glad you asked.
24:37I read stuff.
24:39I research stuff.
24:41I drive around and I find stuff.
24:44Then I write about stuff.
24:45Some people care, some people don't.
24:48I'm chronically unemployed, always broke.
24:50But let's just say that I am obsessed with the truth.
24:54I just felt I understood him as a, you know, I was a young man in the 90s and was in love with
24:59bookstores and LPs and zines and, you know, articles written in The Village Voice and Hunter
25:05S. Thompson.
25:06And I just felt like I understood Lee.
25:08Sterling was already a friend.
25:10We'd had this weird relationship.
25:12We'd actually met through a friend and we started writing a movie together and then
25:16we were becoming friends writing together.
25:19We have a shared sense, a love of history and a love of being playful with it and with humor.
25:25And we just really got along.
25:27I didn't feel like there was any reason why I couldn't play the guy.
25:32And so I did.
25:35Elizabeth.
25:37Larry.
25:38My irreplaceable Elizabeth.
25:41I'm so happy to see you.
25:43Do you like the hair?
25:44I love it.
25:46It's much better than the red.
25:48I think so.
25:48I mean, I like the red too, but this is much more otherworldly.
25:52I have to go set up for the party.
25:54No, no, no.
25:54I got you some flowers.
25:55Oh, I'm overwhelmed.
25:58I have that effect on people.
25:59The thing about Larry Hart's height is it's a big part of his personality.
26:03So to avoid it, the world is heightest.
26:05People ignored him.
26:06People, if he didn't talk all the time, nobody would pay attention to him.
26:09And he wanted to be seen.
26:11And so I knew it was a big part of him.
26:12And, you know, it was really fun.
26:14We got a guy who's a toy inventor and an old stagecraft magician
26:22to start working on how we could do this.
26:25Because I knew the history of movies.
26:26I mean, hell, they make Bogart and Redford and all these other people look tall who weren't tall.
26:31Like, well, couldn't you make somebody look a lot shorter than they were?
26:33And it's got to be ways to do that.
26:35What was fun about us, we used 80 million different tricks.
26:38No digital effects, no nothing.
26:40Link Letters movies are about realism.
26:41So like the idea that we do something, we'll shrink them by 8% and let the computer do it.
26:46You know, it's like, we didn't do any of that.
26:48We just did all these old school tricks about perspective and where the floors are.
26:52And it was really, really fun.
26:54If you see the beauty in everything, you're going to cry all day.
26:59You know, it's the Tennessee Williams line about the tick of the clock.
27:02It says, loss, loss, loss, loss, loss, all day long.
27:06If you're that sensitive, you know, you're going to cry salty tears.
27:12Another point, not dissimilar to Chet Baker.
27:15Chet Baker was a huge Rodgers and Hart fan.
27:16Alcoholism helps for the day and destroys a life, right?
27:22And this person is just, his intelligence and his sensitivity,
27:28he's like an open nerve walking through the world.
27:31And alcohol is the only thing that feels like a jacket.
27:34So his great superpower is language, insight, wit, and that's how he arms himself.
27:42But it's not enough.
27:43This guy is going to the best friend's opening night party.
27:47He's basically going in front of a firing squad.
27:49This is a movie about a man who dies of a broken heart.
27:52What a complex, great role.
27:55Sterling and Linkletter offered me two of the best parts of my career that I got to do in one year.
28:00I secretly worry that I'll be vibrating off this year and that it's all downhill from here.
28:06But, you know, but so be it.
28:08As soon as you start trying to build a character,
28:11before you can even ask that question, you have to ask,
28:14who is my character?
28:15Who is Ethan?
28:16There's an aspect of self-knowledge that has to take place
28:20before you can attempt the shamanistic process of changing yourself.
28:26And that can be extremely confusing.
28:29Children do it with ease because they do it playfully.
28:33And as you get more mature, you start hanging on to your identity in a different way.
28:39Most of us are so much more expansive than we think.
28:42It's very flexible.
28:43And our experiences that we think are so unique are part of the human experience.
28:51And so the process of acting a lot, it starts to expand what you call the self.
28:58That's where the deep end of the pool of acting, I think, lives.
Be the first to comment