In Good Kill, Ethan Hawke essays a drone pilot who lives and works out of suburban Las Vegas, even though his primary duties involve surveying and bombing Afghanistan. It's a strange, disjointed existence and the remoteness of his duties comes to infect every aspect of the character's life.
“The director Andrew Niccol and I did a sci-fi movie together,” says Hawke. “But with this we realised the reality seems like science fiction. Right down to the similarities of the landscapes of Afghanistan and of Nevada. You don’t need to manufacture anything.”
Hawke and Niccol's previous foray into sci-fi was the speculative genetic thriller Gattaca (1997), a film that introduced the actor to his future wife Uma Thurman (the pair divorced in 2005). Hawke has subsequently worked with Nicoll on Lord of War, a scathing depiction of the international arms trade.
“I think he’s one of the great film-makers,” says Hawke.
“He has a unique ability to take on really complex themes and issues. And he’s a New Zealander, so he’s not coming from a left- or right-wing perspective in US terms.”
Are their collaborations politically motivated? The actor is a vocal supporter of the Democratic Party and has made a video with his wife, Ryan, in support of gay marriage.
“I was politically motivated in that it’s a relevant question for our time,” he says.
“It’s a character I’ve never seen before. One hundred miles away he’s doing 9 to 5. Fight the Taliban. Take the kids to school. It forces a level of compartmentalisation that borders on the schizophrenic. It’s a relatively new concept in warfare: one we don’t know anything about. But you know, I don’t really like films that feel like they’re trying to get your vote. I feel like the artistic community’s job is to start a conversation maybe, not to indoctrinate anyone.”
A film and theatre philosophy
Brooklyn raised but Austin born, Hawke makes for an easy-going presence. He is philosophical about the film industry, a place where he turned down Batman and Will Smith's role in Independence Day to found the non-profit theatre group, Malaparte. More recently, various agents of Marvel courted the actor with a view to playing Doctor Strange, to no avail.
“I just love theatre,” says Hawke. “It keeps me in touch with the attitude of an amateur. I mean before the jadedness of professionalism sets in. I’ve done a few other things. I’ve written. I’ve directed a documentary. I feel you have to do things that are fresh and new. And I love doing plays because it’s so much harder than doing retakes.” And so, Hawke has the distinction of turning down both DC and Marvel comics in favour of Shakespeare and Chekhov.
He spent more than six months at New York's Lincoln Centre playing Mikhail Bakunin in an eight-hour-long production of Tom Stoppard's trilogy play The Coast of Utopia.
How does one learn the lines for that?
“Well, if you know Tom Stoppard is going to be watching you the next day you find the energy and time,” grins Hawke.
He shrugs off any notion that he might have been better off on the road-more-travelled:
“I grew up in a household that didn’t put a real high value on financial wealth,” says Hawke (his mother was was a charity worker).
“Both my parents weren’t serious about material things. They were always really serious about their spiritual life. They prioritised that role. But money wasn’t important. I’ve always thought of having a lot of money as a bit embarrassing.”
Movieverse
That's fair enough. Hawke has been part of the movieverse since 1985, when he took his big screen bow alongside River Phoenix in Joe Dante's Explorers.
That director had just scored a hit with Gremlins but Explorers would not make that kind of noise. The teenage Hawke briefly considered alternative careers but was lured back into the business by 1989's Dead Poets Society.
"I do value movies. There are parts of my life I've forgotten. But I can remember making every movie. I remember making Dead Poets Society like it was yesterday. I remember testing with Julie Delpy [for Before Sunrise] like it was a couple of years ago. And I have lasting movie friendships where there's affection and accountability. With Andrew [Niccol]. Or Antoine Fuqua. Or Rick [Linklater]."
He has worked with these film-makers numerous times: he received his first Oscar nomination for work on Fuqua's 2001 cop drama Training Day.
But he is perhaps best known for collaborations with Linklater: Tape, Waking Life, the Before Trilogy and, last seen sweeping all awards ceremonies that are not the Oscars, Boyhood.
Will he miss his annual jaunts to work on Linklater’s time-lapse epic?
“Ask me in a year from now,” Hawke says laughing.
“The project has been a part of my life for so long I can hardly remember a time when I wasn’t involved in it. But I’ve done so much press in the last year, that right now I’m just glad it’s over. It was incredibly fun to make. But it was released by an independent distributor and that put a lot of pressure on myself and Patricia [Arquette]. Because being salesmen is not really our first love.
"But I found it difficult to turn down even one interview about Boyhood. I just wanted more people to see it."
Surprise success
Boyhood surprised him, he says. He thought the project would end up with a Waking Life-sized cult following, that it would prove "too ambitious and too revelatory and too original to make the impact that it did".
But that’s typical of Hawke’s film career, a trajectory that is littered with little movies that could and bigger movies that should. Has he gotten any better – some 30 years into the job – at telling which ones are which?
“No. I’m good at knowing if I’m going to like a movie. I’ve gotten good at that, that’s not so mysterious. What the public relates to and what they don’t and how things are advertised or marketed? That stuff is a mystery to me.
"Years ago I did a genre movie about vampires called Daybreakers. But between me reading that script and the movie coming out, Twilight happened. So by the time we were done, vampires were passé. You can't control those kind of things. But it was kind of a brilliant script and I really loved the guys who made it. So I'm happy."
