‘Making a Movie About Religion Feels Dangerous Right Now’

Ask Ethan and Maya Hawke to talk about their new Flannery O’Connor film and they will quickly admit it’s a tough sell — to audiences, to studios. “If we wanted to make a hit movie, I don’t think a young woman dying of lupus who’s a failed writer on her spiritual journey is a real recipe for an immediate hit,” says Ethan. “A zombie apocalypse might be a little bit easier to get asses in seats.” “She was also a vampire,” jokes Maya.

Even tougher for the Hawkes is how they’re supposed to sell themselves, as both a father-daughter and director-actor pair behind a movie with explicitly personal themes that requires them to hit the promotional trail to get some of the aforementioned asses in seats. “We’re savvy enough to know that there’s a handful of people who might think that the dad-and-daughter act is cute, but the great majority of them roll their eyes,” says Ethan. “‘I don’t need to see your home movies.’”

The three of us are having lunch in Flatiron to discuss Wildcat, a sort-of biopic of O’Connor that follows the young southern writer as she struggles to become a worthy artist while pondering God, ethics, mortality (she was diagnosed with lupus at 24 and died at 39), the point of suffering, and her difficult relationship with her mother. Directed by Ethan and starring Maya (alongside Laura Linney in a series of maternal roles, plus cameos from such actors as Liam Neeson and Steve Zahn), the movie is half-straightforward-biography, half-anthology, punctuating scenes from O’Connor’s life with vignettes based on her fictional stories that tend to thematically reflect back on that life. Bringing their vision to the screen was a labor of love, a boulder they’ve been pushing up a hill together (with yearslong breaks) since Maya was in high school and fell in love with O’Connor’s writing. Naturally, the story of Wildcat is a story of Ethan and Maya, and that’s precisely where things get strange for the two self-described sensitive people who are just as concerned with their own perceptions and attention spans as the rest of us.

Ethan Hawke: I’m really mad at Maya about something. I went to visit her in Atlanta and she just couldn’t stop playing this stupid game.

What game?
E.H.: It doesn’t matter. It’s like turning people on to drugs. It was so annoying. I was talking to you, and you just couldn’t stop doing this [pantomimes cell-phone hypnosis].

M.H.: Couldn’t stop playing the Watermelon Game.

E.H.: And then finally I was like, What is that game?

Oh no.
E.H.: I wake up thinking about it. I wake up thinking, All right, maybe in the taxi to the airport I can play the Watermelon Game. I’m a grown human being. I have things to offer.

M.H.: It’s humiliating. I’ll find myself in a car somewhere. And I’ve got my headphones in, I’ve got the little screen up in the corner of my iPhone, and I’m watching SVU and I’m playing the Watermelon Game, and I’m like, how much stimulation …? I need to be playing a game and watching a TV show at the same time now, that’s what I need now? I don’t want to need that.

E.H.: I did this Netflix film this year, and as I walk around, I can tell millions of people have seen this movie and no one knows the name of the movie because it’s on Netflix. They just click. When you used to go to the movie theater, you’d say, “I want to buy two seats to Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

M.H.: So then they come up to you, being like, “I love that movie that you did with that …”

E.H.: “The one with Julia Roberts.”

M.H.: It’s the way that Netflix works, where as soon as you turn it on, it’s showing you something, playing a trailer at you, and then you just select that thing.

E.H.: And it makes me think about, will they even remember they saw it in five years? 

This is an absolutely sick thing to take away from Wildcat, but I was sort of jealous of Flannery O’Connor in the movie, in that she had no distractions to her writing process.
M.H.: Oh, I know.

E.H.: She’s gotta feed the chickens twice a day.

Besides that, what about her was so appealing to you?
M.H.: The short stories were required reading in my English class and I loved them. And then I went to our local bookstore — what’s it called?

E.H.: Books Are Magic.

M.H.: And I was looking around the shelves and I saw another book of hers called The Prayer Journal that I had not read and hadn’t been recommended by my teacher. I was like, Oh, that would really be impressive, if I buy an extra book by the same author.

E.H.: That’ll give you extra credit.

M.H.: I was really moved by it — a young person who was extremely ambitious but knew that her ambition was the impediment toward the idea of her own enlightenment, the impediment to her connection to God, the impediment to her being as good a writer as she wanted to be. How good she wanted to be was what was standing in the way of her and being that good.

I love that idea. I love that she wasn’t really writing about boys. I loved that she was so, at 22 or 23, invested in her inner life. And I had always known my dad to be a closet Christian and to be constantly investigating his spiritual life. And so I brought it when he was shooting Magnificent Seven, and we just read it together in his trailer out loud, and it was a really nice way that we connected to each other, because she was a young woman who was going through all these young-woman issues, but she was also a deep thinker and an author and an artist and a writer and a spiritualist. And so there was a lot of common ground there between the two of us. It was a great tool in which to talk to each other.

E.H.: We started daydreaming about going to her house and making a short film.

When Maya was in high school still?
E.H.: Yeah, like, let’s just make a short film about The Prayer Journal. And that’s where the idea started. And then it was just a conversation —

M.H.: That kept happening. Then we forgot about it for a while. We worked on editing it for my Juilliard audition monologue. We forgot about it for a while again, and I kept trying to chase down the rights, and it took me a really long time to find who had them. Producer Joe Goodman. It wasn’t until I started talking about how I wanted to do it in the press — then he found me. Then I introduced him to Ethan, and then that’s where it all began.

I love that you call him Ethan.
M.H.: I don’t. I don’t know why I did that. Sometimes I do it when I’m nervous. I guess that when I introduced him to Joe, I introduced him as Ethan, but I don’t call him Ethan.

What does a closet Christian mean? Ethan, do you agree with that assessment?
E.H.: If we were sitting at a big dinner table at a party of people we really liked and somebody said, “Hey, do you guys want to talk about God?” everybody would say “no.” They would get up and excuse themselves to go to the bathroom. So that’s the closet part — if you announce any aspect of seeking, it scares people because they’re worried you’re going to proselytize, they’re worried you’re going to have an agenda with them. And so dialogue shuts down about it. I’ve always just found it dangerous to talk about.

And it was dangerous to make a film about it, actually, because in the history of film, there are few sincere spiritual films. If you see religious people in movies, they’re either, like, in a horror film performing exorcisms, or you’re being preached at. And one of the things that I always loved about Flannery O’Connor is she was this wildly devout woman and she didn’t proselytize. She tried to internalize her faith and live in the real world and write about what she saw, but she’s not trying to convince you to believe something.

I always found her hypnotic, too, because at a cursory glance, if you see a picture of her or know that she’s a young woman from the South, you think you’re going to get a Louisa May Alcott. You think you’re going to get Emily Dickinson or something. And instead you get this ferocious, badass, Charles Bukowski–type brain coming from this young person with crutches and glasses.

M.H.: What I meant when I said that also was that your background, your childhood upbringing around religion, was mostly around Christianity, but then as an adult you’ve combined what you like about that with —

E.H.: Other reading.

M.H.: You’re equally interested in what Emerson has to say as you are what Thomas Merton has to say.

E.H.: But the truth is that my mother ran the Sunday school. I really was raised in that. I don’t talk about it that much, because it tends to make people go to their corner. I got to play John Brown for this Showtime series The Good Lord Bird, and I got to do Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. I got to do this. It’s been interesting that this chapter of my life has been in this milieu of people of faith.

What’s your relationship to religion and spirituality, Maya?
M.H.: I grew up in an interesting hodgepodge. I didn’t go to Sunday school and I didn’t go to church every Sunday. My grandfather is a Buddhist philosopher and teacher, but he didn’t force it down my throat at all, either. I think I was lucky to grow up in an environment around a lot of philosophical and spiritual information without having anyone tell me what they wanted me to think.

E.H.: Those kinds of conversations are so much more valuable when you discover them on your own. I didn’t give you Flannery O’Connor, you found that. If I had, I might’ve ruined it.

M.H.: I like the Dalai Lama quote, “Everything is a finger pointing at the moon and no one knows what the moon is.” I’ve always felt interested in whatever the moon is and that there’s some reason that we exist, because it just helps and makes life more interesting. There have been times that I’ve been really into astrology, and partially that was because of the idea that there was a reason something was happening, that you were feeling pain, and the pain would get you somewhere else or it would end in June. And usually it ends in June anyway, because the weather gets a little better and sadness can only last so long. But it’s all interesting and exploratory to feel like there might be a reason we exist.

I saw some tweet about the recent earthquake in New York City and the eclipse, and it was like, if this had happened in medieval times, in that order, there would be some new freaky religion.
E.H.: Oh, for sure. The three signs of the apocalypse.

So you put the movie to the side for a while and then started the conversation again when you got the rights. How did you envision it and pitch it at first?
E.H.: To be honest with you, if you had asked me whether I thought we would ever get it made, probably not.

M.H.: Me too.

E.H.: It’s very strange, the film industry. It’s a very mercurial business about what people are interested in investing in, what they’re not, and when people are willing to take a risk and when they’re not. And you have to find like-minded spirits, and if you find them, doors open, and if you don’t, you just kind of learn, Well, I’ll revisit this project in a few years to see if the stars have aligned differently, if Mercury’s in retrograde.

How involved were you both in writing it?
E.H.:  Can I take the lead? Or no, you go first.

M.H.: I’ll go first quickly. Initially, I was like, I want to do this. I don’t know how it could be done. This is a person with very limited plot in their life story, and the plot that they do have, I don’t even know if I really want to make a movie about that. And I don’t know how to make it; I don’t know how to talk about the stories. I don’t know how to involve her writing. Wildcat co-writer Shelby Gaines was doing a lot of research, and Dad was doing a lot of creative thinking and analyzing: Is it even possible to make a movie about someone who didn’t really leave their bedroom for most of their life? And then he had this incredible idea to make a movie about that — about her inner life and the way that we can explore the world through our imagination. That’s when I was like, Whoa, I think this could happen.

E.H.: That was exactly what I was going to say. Maya came to visit me and we went out to dinner, and I told you the beginning to the end of the movie. It was a very simple idea: The movie’s going to end before she’s ever really been published. And you loved it.

And you looped in Laura Linney to be Flannery’s mother.
M.H.: That was a big breakthrough in the scriptwriting process, finding that character. The primary character in her life is her mother. And her mother shows up all over her stories, her letters, her life. I was like, Wow, I don’t want to be the only character in this movie, and she lived such a lonely life. We hoped for an actress as good as Laura, to move through all these worlds together, to give me someone to play off of and play with.

E.H.: She’s from the South, so she of course knows everything about Flannery. While I was working on the script, I was finishing The Last Movie Stars, which is this documentary of Paul Newman. Laura was friends with Joanne Woodward and my friends. So I was Zooming with her and she was voicing Joanne in the documentary, and I was biting my tongue the whole time. I kept wanting to give the script to her, but I knew she’s so smart —

M.H.: You don’t want to give her your —

E.H.: First draft.

You have a long-standing relationship with Laura, Ethan, and both of you were close with Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose son, Cooper, plays a sort of villainous character in one of these vignettes. What did that mean to you personally, to have your children interacting like this, in a film you directed?
E.H.: We saw Licorice Pizza and I was like, Wow, Cooper’s gotten good, and we met him for breakfast and offered him the part, and we jumped for joy when he said yes. It was powerful for Laura and me. We’d both been old friends with Phil, and so it was powerful for obvious reasons, but then it was even more powerful to watch the two of you rehearsing — how seriously he took it and how seriously you took it, and the level of difficulty of what they were being asked as young actors. Anybody who’s read Flannery’s “Good Country People” knows those are complicated human beings, and you guys just dove right into it.

At the Telluride premiere, Maya, you referred to the film as “dangerous.” Why?
M.H.: Making a movie about religion feels dangerous right now. Making a movie about a not particularly beautiful, not particularly nice, not particularly digestible female southern writer.

E.H.: White women in the Jim Crow South. Nobody’s more unlikable there.

M.H.: The idea of walking into Netflix and pitching this movie right now would feel ridiculous. So it’s a miracle that we got to make it — I mean, everything else about it felt dangerous and hard: hard to do an accent, hard to play a disease, hard to do a limp. Sometimes, I feel like the hardest thing to do is something that’s almost yourself, but you have to make it different in these little ways. I felt certain that I was going to fail, and that certainty that it was an impossible task was almost a relief.

E.H.: It’s liberating, in a way. “The attempt is worthwhile, so fuck it, I’ll fail.’

M.H.: Yeah. “It’s impossible to nail this.”

E.H.: You also said something to me early on that was very compelling, just about growing up and watching so many movies where it’s got a male protagonist — whether it’s Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, whatever — and a male protagonist’s primary relationship is to themselves and their work, and why can’t we do that with women? Flannery’s a little weird. She’s prickly, she’s wild, she’s judgmental.

M.H.: Most movies about young women revolve around their romantic relationships, and she didn’t have one, so we couldn’t do that. It felt like an invitation to ask myself and anyone who saw the movie to accept a different kind of woman. Whether or not they do is completely out of anyone’s control.

There’s been a reappraisal of her over the years, as someone who was racist in her time and used the N-word in her letters.
E.H.: That’s dangerous, too. Because the problem is, you can’t talk about the history of America without talking about America’s wounds, their crimes and their sins, and the people who are all born and raised of that water and in that soil and are of those crimes. But if you don’t talk about the past —

M.H.: Then you start to erase it.

E.H.: We want to color-blind cast and diversify, make ourselves feel better about what we’re looking at. But we don’t like looking at it.

M.H.: I would say, even, it’s not that there’s been some discovery that she may have been racist. She was definitely racist. It’s not like there was some hidden thing that was found and it was like, Oh, this person we thought was the hero of Black America is now discovered to not be.

E.H.: No, she was a hero of a white America that’s now coming to a point. My mother gave me Flannery’s work to promote feminism. My mom was like, “You have to read female writers too.” I didn’t know or think about her racism until, I don’t know, the George Floyd reckoning started. When Maya and I started this idea, we had no awareness of that, and then we had to have a talk with each other: “Is this a reason not to make the movie?”

M.H.: I do think you should be allowed to tell stories about things that are not inherently celebrating them. And there is this, I think, new idea that everything you make, every time you put on a camera and take a picture of something, it’s inherently a celebration of that thing.

E.H.: It’s a promotion of it.

M.H.: And we have to be allowed to talk about things and photograph things that we don’t believe in.

E.H.: Or that we have problems with.

M.H.: If we don’t find a way to talk about Flannery, how can we find a way to talk about any of our relatives and any of our history? And we have to reflect on it, reflect on what is good about it and the wit and the brilliance, what isn’t bad about it, and try to take the good and let go of the bad — like every generation tries to do to their parents.

E.H.: Alice Walker, who is a Flannery O’Connor fan, had a great quote about how what she loved about Flannery’s writing was there wasn’t a hint of magnolia in the air. And she says to be careful when you want to cast aside a genius; our geniuses are here for us to learn from.

I’m curious how you both feel about the idea that pervades Flannery’s consciousness, that you have to suffer to make good art? Do you feel like you have or had to?
E.H.: I remember shooting a film in South Africa once, and I read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography in Cape Town. And you’re like, Wow. The wisdom that he achieved did not come easily. This is a hard, hard life. If you live a pretty trivial life, it’s hard to think substantive thoughts. And if you live a brutal life and rise to greet it and become a very powerful and significant person … I think you can make a case that Ms. O’Connor was a brilliant young person who got hit with the reality of mortality really early, and it advanced her thinking and advanced the way that she looked at dinner conversations and everything. But I don’t know that it’s necessary. There’s a lot of really happy-go-lucky people who have no reason to be as talented as they are. I mean, how the hell did Bob Dylan turn into Bob Dylan?

M.H.: It cannot be something that is pursued. When people start pursuing misery in order to improve their integrity, they are declaring themselves foolish. I’ve heard it said before that being an artist often intersects with being a vibrating, very sensitive person. And the world is very brutal to sensitive people, and they do often suffer a lot. But the goal has to be toward, for me at least, happiness, toward healthy relationships, toward kindness and generosity, not toward self-indulgent misery to improve your art.

E.H.: You see that a lot with addiction. There are a lot of artists who I think end up setting themselves on fire to feel great. Usually, when they are successful, they’re successful despite setting themselves on fire, not because of it.

Have you always felt that way? Or did you used to feel like you personally had to be tortured?
E.H.: I have to give a lot of credit to my friendship with Richard Linklater. He’s really frustrated by navel-gazing. I remember around the time Before Sunrise came out, we were hanging out with some really cool, hip, interesting people, and this guy said to me, “What Ethan needs to do is go to Mexico, shoot up. He needs to live a little, and then he can really do something.” And Rick, as soon as the guy walked away, he was like, “That guy’s an asshole. What you need to do is read some William Burroughs.” Rick is the first artist of my generation who I came in contact with, and he’s really, really brilliant and really happy. He loves going to rock shows and baseball games and hanging out with his daughter. He is just completely disinterested in suffering for suffering’s sake.

M.H.: And in terms of music, I think it’s so much harder to write something great about happiness. It’s actually extremely difficult to sit down and describe a joyful moment in a way that feels original and brilliant. Everybody’s misery feels original to them when they’re miserable, because it feels so palpable and painful. But it’s hard to write a happy song — a song like “Dancing in the Moonlight.” I try all the time; it’s a very hard thing to do.

How did you both balance the intense personal dynamic that you clearly share with wanting to be professional on set?
M.H.: For me, it wasn’t hard. We’ve been working together our whole lives. My whole life. You were around before. [Laughs] But we’ve been writing poetry and doing audition tapes and play readings and going to school plays and talking about them after and going to his plays. We’ve been engaged in a conversation about the arts for my entire life, and this felt like a continuation of it. The movie’s budget wasn’t big enough for us to really ask anyone other than our friends to be in it. So most of the actors in it, excluding a couple exceptional people, we’d known before. They came in like, “Oh, yeah, these people who I go to dinner with who don’t stop talking about art, they want me to come do a movie with them and talk about art there? Happily.”

The thing that’s been complicated is figuring out how to talk about it. The doing of the movie is easy. The press is complicated sometimes.

E.H.: When you make it a public unit of sale —  that’s the only time we felt uncomfortable.

What do you mean exactly by “public unit of sale”?
E.H.: We’re savvy enough to know that there’s a handful of people who might think that the dad-and-daughter act is cute, but the great majority of them roll their eyes: “I don’t need to see your home movies. I’ve got my own home movies.” As soon as we premiered at Telluride, it was like, Oh, I get what everybody’s going to talk about. They’re going to talk about the dad-daughter thing. 

We were so involved in what we were doing that we stopped thinking about that. I have such respect for Maya’s artistic compass that I wasn’t thinking about my daughter. I was thinking about, Well, Maya’s not going to like this shot. I had an artistic collaborator who was exciting to work with. The only thing that’s hard is putting a package on it and how the eye of the Zeitgeist looks upon that, because we’re very important to each other.

M.H.: We’re extremely sensitive and very important to each other. And we really were not thinking about the marketing of the movie. It was only in the aftermath where we were like, “Huh, I wonder what people will think about the fact that we went there.”

E.H.: It’s a little, like, Whoa. You don’t think when you’re dancing at a party, then later you’re like, Did I really dance like this?

M.H.: Exactly.

I’m more interested in your dynamic as an artistic family than anything cutesy, and what that was like for all of you. The way you’ve both spoken about your family in interviews makes it seem like it was sort of an artistic commune, idyllic in a lot of ways but also frustrating. I’m curious about how it actually felt for you.
E.H.: When I was younger, I was friends with Natasha Richardson, and I loved listening to her talk about the relationship with her mom and her father, Tony Richardson, this great director. I remember feeling envious. I remember Natasha telling the story about how when she was in this Paul Schrader film at Cannes, knowing that her mother had been at Cannes, she felt like she was a princess of a craft, like she was running a shoe shop that had carried on: “Since 1886, we’ve been making plays and movies.” I thought that was really cool, and it put in my head that it was a doable thing. One of my favorite movies is John Huston’s The Dead, which Anjelica Huston made happen. There’s something beautiful about a family business.

How did it feel to you, Maya?
E.H.: Maya makes this joke, people come up to her all the time and say, “Wow, you look just like your mother.” She says, “Yes. So do you.”

M.H.: They’re like, “You know my mom?!” And I’m like, “No.”

Yeah. I think it’s interesting — everyone’s life has an idyllic way that you can look at it and an un-ideal way to look at it. Obviously, in the nature that one would talk about it in public, one would focus on the positives. But, really, the truth about my life is that there are a tremendous amount of positives. And I think that that’s where the anger comes from, because there is a lot to be jealous of. It’s really about exposure. Exposure to the arts, exposure to interesting things. I got to travel so much as a kid and see so much of the world. And go to plays with him, so many plays on Broadway and Off Broadway.

E.H.: You get to go backstage and see how people rehearse and how they do their costumes.

M.H.: That kind of exposure is idyllic, because so many artists are like, “You don’t learn in art school, you learn making movies. You’ve got to go make stuff.” And it’s hard to make stuff. It’s hard to get permission to be on a set. It’s a difficult world to enter. To have spent your entire life getting that door opened, and just even getting to sit there and watch, is an extraordinary and enviable privilege.

How has your relationship changed over time?
E.H.: You hear people complaining about aging all the time, and there’s a lot to complain about, but I never even imagined what it was like to have adult children. When you imagine having children, you imagine taking them to the park and putting them in a swing. You can’t really imagine a 25-year-old woman who can talk the way that she talks. I’m trapped in the ’90s, with these ’90s references. I learn a lot about what’s happening in popular culture through Maya. Young people are forcing you to articulate, challenging you to remain idealistic and to remain principled. That challenge is extremely engaging and makes life worth living again in a new way.

What qualities do you see of yourselves in each other?
M.H.: I like to ask my dad for advice when I’m having a hard time, because I think we have a hard time in really similar ways. Even something as simple as struggling with my voice when I’m acting or singing and I feel like I’m losing it. I’ve learned from watching my dad that something we share is that our anxiety chokes us. A lot of our power is invested in our speaking and talking and our vocal quality. And so when we feel powerless, we lose our voices.

I also feel like we’re similarly both enjoyable and annoying people to take out to dinner. We can’t stop talking, and we’re really a nightmare to go out to dinner with together.

Ethan, what’s something that you’ve learned from Maya?
E.H.: Maya has worked significantly enough now that if I’m having difficulty figuring out how to work with a scene partner, I can call my daughter and explain the situation to her and she can be very insightful. “You said what? Yeah. See, that would’ve really pissed me off.” “Really? Why?” “Well, try saying this, go apologize for that, and I guarantee it’ll go better.” “But I’m not sorry for them.” “You’re sorry that they feel that way. You are sorry.” “Okay. Okay. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” And I’ll call back: “You won’t believe it. It worked.” “Yeah. I told you.”

At what point in her life did you realize that she actually could be an artist?
E.H.: Since she could speak. I didn’t know how it was going to manifest itself, but I was 100 percent positive from a very young age that she can’t do anything else.

M.H.: Not untrue.

E.H.: She’d lose her shoes at a Knicks game. It’s hard to do. You’re not supposed to take them off.

M.H.: I still lose my shoes.

E.H.: She was the most fun person, as a small person, to talk to about a poem or a play or a painting, a photograph. The ways that she would think about a canoe trip or what she would say about a dog we had or whatever. She was always extremely precocious. She was one of those kids who, as a young person, was very comfortable with adults. She invited a bunch of my friends to her high-school graduation party. She’s also the type of kid, when some teacher asked her if she was happy, she said “no.” And the teacher said, “I’m really worried about your daughter. She said she’s not happy.” I asked Maya about it. She’s like, “I thought it was a boring question. Who’s really happy?”

I hope this wasn’t too painful, considering the “unit of sale” aspect.
M.H.: It’s not painful. It’s just awkward. Both of us, I think, struggle independently with press, with wanting to be completely ourselves and really honest and make real connections.

E.H.: And have everyone like us.

M.H.: And have everyone like us.