Ethan Hawke Interview, The Hottest State

MoviesOnline caught up with Ethan Hawke at the Los Angeles press day to promote his new film, "The Hottest State.” Adapted by Hawke from his own novel of the same name, "The Hottest State” is a bittersweet romance that distills the joy, pain, erotic highs, and emotional lows of first love. Ethan Hawke directs and co-stars in the film along with Mark Webber, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Laura Linney.

Days before his 21^st birthday, William (Mark Webber), an actor, meets and quickly falls madly in love with Sara (Oscar-nominee Catalina Sandino Moreno), a seductive yet elusive singer/songwriter. The film follows William from a Lower East Side tenement to a Mexican hotel room to a snowbound weekend in Connecticut to a sweltering homecoming in the hottest state of all – Texas -- in the pursuit of Sara. His stubborn and sweetly innocent quest to find someone who loves him as much as he loves her may not lead to happiness, but surely leads to newfound maturity.

According to Hawke, "This film is the story of William and Sara’s youthfully manic, passionate, misguided, short-lived romance. The affair is meaningful only as a catalyst for a deeper awakening inside of William. The title, "The Hottest State,” refers both to the ‘state’ of William’s origin and to the high pitched feverish ‘state’ of first love. William impales himself on Sara, scraping off an old childhood scab, and the two wounds become difficult to differentiate. To me, the past never seems to go anywhere, it is alive and present in each new breath and changes as perspective and understanding evolve.”

Ethan elaborates, "This film’s hero is a young actor from Texas, arriving in New York, without any real sense of authenticity or identity; which was exactly where I was 15 years ago when I first started writing the novel from which the movie was adapted. My hope was that with a little bit of time I could better understand the themes of this story and make an honest personal film.”

An Academy Award nominated actor for his work in "Training Day,” an Academy Award nominated writer for the "Before Sunset” screenplay and a Tony Award nominated actor for his work on stage in "The Coast of Utopia,” Ethan Hawke constantly challenges himself as an artist. He has established a successful career acting in film and theater, as a novelist, a screenwriter and a director.  Ethan is a fabulous guy and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about his new film:

MoviesOnline: Where did the concept of bringing this to the big screen come from as well as your decision to direct and do the cameo role?

ETHAN HAWKE: It just kind of rolled out. I have to say this project happened incredibly organically. I was never that interested… I guess I should say I was scared to engage in such a self-reflective piece of art. I was interested in letting that kind of work go by, but I kept thinking about this book and I directed my first movie and Mark Webber was in it and I started thinking about what a good William Harding he would be. And the producer of "Chelsea Walls,” which was this little experimental movie I did, said we should really make "The Hottest State” into a movie. And I said, "Well that would be really fun.” She said, "Would you mind if I looked around to see if we could find some money for it?” Our Japanese distributor of "Chelsea Walls” was very interested and said, "Well, if you can make it for under X amount of money, we’d do it.” And I said, "Sure. You want to do it next fall?” and we started doing it. There was no grand plan of ‘the world needs to see this.’ I kind of felt like this is something in my comfort zone – like I thought I could do this well. And I really wanted to learn more about making movies. I like working with young actors. I thought that would be something I’d be familiar with and interested in doing. I thought that I could revisit some material and try to make it better and stronger.

MoviesOnline: Having not read the book, did you have to cut a lot out of it for the movie and was it hard to actually cut out your own…?

ETHAN HAWKE: No, I’m not that precious about things. It’s kind of fun whenever you go back to something… I’m sure when I revisit this movie 10 years from now, I’ll think I could’ve cut 30 minutes out of that movie. I basically don’t give myself much credit for adapting the novel. I kind of shot the novel. You just kind of distill it to its essence. There’s some fun changes. You cast a Latin woman as the lead and all of a sudden you’re like, "Let’s run with that. Let’s do a bunch of Latin imagery.” You know in the book they go to Paris to shoot a movie and I go, "Let’s make it in Mexico. What could that be? Let’s do that. I’ll be Tennessee Williams. We could shoot "Camino Real.” That’d take place there. That would be a fun way to play. You just kind of let it unfold, but pretty much it’s not a complicated adaptation.

MoviesOnline: How was it watching Mark’s transition from the little role in "Chelsea Wall” to the lead role in this?

ETHAN HAWKE: I don’t know. We’re all funny with actors. Some actors you just can’t stand no matter what they do and some actors you love them no matter what they do. You forgive. For some reason, Mark touches me and something about him moves me. He’s got soul. I like him. Young actors right now are often put in the position where they’re trying to maximize their moment. They don’t seem to be that interested in the life of an artist. It’s a life long journey that is not a business and that they don’t have to play each moment right. What you really need to focus on is simply being a craftsman and doing it. Mark has a good sense of that. He has a good time and I enjoy that.

MoviesOnline: Can you talk a little bit about how you draw on your own life experiences for this film?

ETHAN HAWKE: Sure. 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. 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. Now it feels like somebody else’s life. My life is no reflection of this anymore. I have two kids. One of them is 9 years old. I’m divorced. I’ve been a movie actor for a bunch of years. I hoped that I could take what I learned and use a more mature camera, for example, to capture it. What was kind of neat, what I feel proud of about "The Hottest State,” the novel, is that I wrote it so young that it’s not nostalgic at all. You know normally a lot of stories about youth and romantic first love and stuff – you know (Ivan) Turgenev’s "First Love”or even (Anton) Chekhov’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. And I wrote it as if it was really important. [Laughs] And then I felt like I could do a little combination of both.

MoviesOnline: Do you have any plans to adapt "Ash Wednesday”? I loved that book.

ETHAN HAWKE: I love "Ash Wednesday” too. You know this is a case where I’d rather do that movie. "The Hottest State” is an easier movie to make because it’s cheaper. It’s more contained. "Ash Wednesday” is a longer novel and more complicated. It’s told from two points of view. I thought about making it into a movie. Basically what I did, when I can’t write, I tooled around with adapting "The Hottest State.” That’s what I did. I thought that’d be a fun project to do. I tried it with "Ash Wednesday” too and that screenplay never really took off. "The Hottest State” is very dialogue heavy. "Ash Wednesday” has dialogue, but it’s these dueling voices of the narrator and a lot of it is back story. You know it’s a road trip but so much of it is…anyway it’s a harder adaptation and I would like to make it. If for some reason I got lucky and people liked this movie, "The Hottest State,” then my dream would be to finish a third book and then make "Ash Wednesday” and then stay ahead of the game always. That would be my fantasy.

MoviesOnline: Do you have a third book you’re working on right now?

ETHAN HAWKE: Yeah. I’ve been working on it for awhile. It hasn’t seemed to take off for me.

MoviesOnline: Does that mean you have story ideas that you just try to put into it but you can’t get the ending or you can’t get the middle?

ETHAN HAWKE: Well sometimes something takes off and sometimes it doesn’t. It seems to be at war. It’s going to be one book or another book. I have four first chapters with totally different voices. I don’t know exactly how to tell the story, but anyway…

MoviesOnline: Are you waiting for inspiration?

ETHAN HAWKE: Yeah. Maybe I’m waiting for perspective. To be honest, the truth is I actually believe that inspiration comes through applying yourself. You’ve got to work hard. Waiting for inspiration is a sure fire way never to write a book. The last few years for me have been… It takes a long time to make a movie between getting the money, casting it, you were going to start shooting in September, then Catalina’s not available until December, and then editing takes a long time. Between that, I threw myself back at the theater for the last few years. So that’s eating up a lot of time. The movie business is more conducive to writing because you can work hard for 10 weeks and then have 6 months off.

MoviesOnline: Do you see yourself going through a phase where you want to get back into acting in movies again?

ETHAN HAWKE: Day after tomorrow I’m going to Australia to do a vampire movie. It’s called "Daybreakers.” It’s a terrific script but nothing like anything I’ve ever done before.

MoviesOnline: Who’s directing it?

ETHAN HAWKE: These two brothers (Michael and Peter Spierig) from Australia. They wrote an incredible ‘vampires as allegory’ story. It takes place in the future when we’re all vampires but we’ve consumed all our own resources – humans -- and so it’s a whole world of vampires.

MoviesOnline: Do you play a vampire in the movie as well?

ETHAN HAWKE: Yeah, I do.

MoviesOnline: Have they given you the teeth fitting yet?

ETHAN HAWKE: They have.

MoviesOnline: Topher Grace said that what he did in "Spider-Man 3” was the most painful thing. Are they okay? Are they fun?

ETHAN HAWKE: I haven’t tried them on yet. [Laughter]

MoviesOnline: How did you choose the music for this?

ETHAN HAWKE: If I could properly explain to you guys what Jesse Harris did for the music in this, he should win every award that these kinds of things do. I knew that I wanted to make a movie about first love and that first love should have a soundtrack. While I normally can’t stand too much music in a movie, I felt a movie about first love should be wall-to-wall music – like being young and in love as a soundtrack. The radio’s always on when you’re 21. But I wanted all the music to be original so I asked Jesse to score the movie using new rock songs. For example, the first page of the script says "Exterior: Texas, Late 70s.” Well, that should be Willie Nelson. I need you to write me a song for Willie Nelson. He gave me access to his whole back catalog and wrote some new songs. He wrote all the songs for Catalina. My hope would be that there would be this unbelievable amount of music but that it wouldn’t be like somebody playing you a mix tape because it was all written by one person, that it would have some uniformity of theme, of style, and that the music could start to be this kind of Greek chorus underneath the story.

All the songs are chosen or written for the moments of the movie so they’re kind of commenting on it in a way and leading it and guiding it. I just think what he did was really special and it really came through. We had these moments of like "Okay, what do we play?” We sat there with the script before all of it was done. It was like "Okay, I’ve got this scene that says he walks through Brooklyn despondent. That’s obvious. We’re going to be playing, we’re going to be cranking some music there. What is it?” And we’d sit there and go, "Okay ‘Cat Power.’ When you got the blues, that’s ‘Cat Power.’” We’d play this song but I needed kicking testosterone. We needed a hard blues song. He’s like "Well here’s three or four blues songs. We’ve got ‘The Black Keys’ for the cover one.” That’s how we did it. I think it’s unprecedented. I don’t know anybody who wrote this much music for a movie.

MoviesOnline: Did you notice that Mark picked up certain personality ticks from you? There were things in the movie that I thought, "That’s something Ethan Hawke might have done when he was younger.”

ETHAN HAWKE: [Laughs] I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Mark. Some friends of mine say that he does. I don’t see them at all. He’s a terrific young actor. We’re a similar type of person in a way. I also think that people project that kind of thing on him a little bit because people are familiar with me when I was that age. Sometimes I think I would have done Mark a better service by casting an African American kid to play the part or cast the whole thing in Hong Kong, and then it would avoid those comparisons.

MoviesOnline: How did you bring Catalina Sandino Moreno on board? She had only done "Maria Full of Grace” before this, correct?

ETHAN HAWKE: "Maria Full of Grace” premiered at the Berlin Film Festival at the same time that "Before Sunset” did. I was just really thinking about this movie and I saw her and I thought now that’s incredible. She had a lot of the qualities that Sara did in the book. Sara was supposed to be like a white girl who goes to Sarah Lawrence, you know, very different. But I needed somebody who had a lot of soul and somebody who was both incredibly beautiful and looked like a normal person and didn’t look like a model. I felt like Catalina has that kind of enigmatic quality that a true, great heartbreaker must possess.

MoviesOnline: Casting Sonia Braga as her mother was another great choice you made.

ETHAN HAWKE: It’s funny, the moment I cast Catalina, I thought, "Now we have to call Sonia Braga.” But of course I’m such an idiot, I didn’t realize Sonia Braga is from Brazil and Catalina is from Columbia. I had this whole plan of how in the dinner scene they would be ratchet firing Spanish back and forth to each other and Sonia Braga comes in for rehearsal and says, "I don’t speak Spanish.” I say, "What do you mean you don’t?” And she goes, "I’m from South America. It’s a big place South America.” She speaks Portuguese and so I was like, "Oh, well, we won’t do that then.” [Laughs]

MoviesOnline: How hard was it to get Richard Linklater to play the John Wayne enthusiast?

ETHAN HAWKE: You know that was fun. I wanted a scene that showed how hard it is at that moment when you’re first getting to know somebody and you guys go out into public. It’s just that kind of strange feeling. It’s one thing you have these kind of private moments to get to know each other and then you go to her best friend’s party and all of a sudden she doesn’t like the way you eat or something. Why are you wearing that? It’s a tenuous moment in a budding romance. And I wanted the party to be full of … It happens to me with the women I’ve dated. I’ll take her to some party and then it’ll come back, "Your friends are all so full of themselves. Everybody’s so pretentious.” So I put Richard Linklater and the playwright Jonathan Mark Sherman in that scene because they’ve been two of my great influences. Jonathan Mark Sherman is the guy who says, "You know why nobody’s setting themselves on fire? George Bush doesn’t deserve your setting your whole self all on fire. Just one ball. George Bush deserves one singed ball.” That’s what he says in the background. It was easy. Rick loves to act. Rick’s a good actor and I’d love to find the right part for him some day.

MoviesOnline: The look of the film is very similar to "Great Expectations.” Was that deliberate on your part?

ETHAN HAWKE: It’s funny that you say that because it’s very different. "Great Expectations,” if you remember, was all saturated in green. Alfonso (Cuaron) did a really smart thing. He figured out how to mix something almost black and white but monochromatic. [demonstrating] The table cloth here would be green and I’d be smoking Cool cigarettes and everything was just different shades of green – the green palette – yellow, blue. But I really was amazed at how effective it was. I made fun of him the whole time we shot it and I watched the movie and I was like, "This is really effective.” I went for a level of color saturation. I didn’t go with the green thing but Catalina has her blue thing. Her apartment is blue and he brings her into the bathroom and it’s blue. Her world was blue, "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” and everything. And when they went to Texas, you never see the color red until they go to Mexico and then just everything is red. We played with color in that way.

MoviesOnline: Thank you very much. Have fun in Australia.

ETHAN HAWKE: Thank you. I enjoyed talking to you.

"The Hottest State” will open in theaters on August 24^th.