Ethan Hawke is speaking for the first time about his latest Richard Linklater collaboration, “Blue Moon,” revealing that he first read the script for the biopic of lyricist Lorenz Hart 12 years ago.
“I love it, let’s do it. We gotta make this movie,” Hawke recalled telling Linklater during a Venice Film Festival masterclass on Monday. But there was just one problem — the director thought Hawke was “still too attractive” to pull off the role.
“He’s like, ‘Cool, we’re going to make it, but we need to wait a while.’ Why do we need to wait a while? He said, ‘You’re still too attractive. We gotta wait til you’re a little less attractive.’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Hawke said. “He’s like, ‘Just trust me. Let’s just put it in a drawer, and every couple of years let’s read it and see if we’re ready or not.’”
Hawke said the two revisited the script every few years, but the time was never right — until recently. “He saw me on an interview, I was on the Jimmy Fallon show or something last year, and he called me up and he said, ‘Hey, I saw you on Jimmy Fallon!’ I said, ‘Oh great, how’d it go?’ He said, ‘Oh, it was fine. Let’s make “Blue Moon.”‘ Like, go to hell.”
“You are more attractive now!” an audience member yelled in response, to which Hawke replied: “Thank you, that’s what I’m saying!”
Despite the insult to his looks, Hawke said “Blue Moon” — which recently wrapped production — “might be the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life.”
“It was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done, so I kinda can’t wait for people to see that,” he teased.
“Blue Moon,” which Hawke said “all takes place in real time,” is set on the opening night of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” in 1943, which marked the duo’s first project together. Rodgers’ former songwriting partner, Hart, attends the premiere amid struggles with alcoholism and depression that eventually contributed to his death eight months later.
Also during the masterclass, Hawke said he admires “the hell out of” filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola who put so much of their own money into financing passion projects.
“I love that Coppola sold his winery to make that movie, I think that’s amazing,” Hawke said, adding: “I love it when people keep the great dream alive of making something magnificent.”
He continued, “It’s very hard because the whole industry that runs movie-making is designed to make money. Most of our favorite movies, that’s not what was motivating the project, so you have to keep that spirit alive … I would never want to not be a person who wouldn’t sell their house to make a movie. I love that, I think it’s cool. I admire the hell out of it.”
From Variety US