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| Ethan Hawke. Photo: Telluride Film Festival / © Eugene Kwon. |
Made possible by a donation from the Burns Family.
John Horn (TFF 2025): "In his new film BLUE MOON, Ethan Hawke stars as the great lyricist Lorenz Hart at the moment he’s been spurned. His collaborator Richard Rodgers has just opened Oklahoma! on Broadway with a new partner, Oscar Hammerstein II. The dyspeptic Hart drunkenly mocks Rodgers and Hammerstein’s soon-to-be-classic musical, spitting out crude jokes and self-important boasts. Why would Hawke agree to play such an outwardly disagreeable character? Through his depiction, he makes the film about more than a has-been alcoholic writer: He makes it about art itself."
"Hawke’s virtue as an artist is his passion for the creative process. He’s acted in studio productions including an Oscar-nominated performance opposite Denzel Washington in TRAINING DAY (2001). His scores of independent movies include decades-long partnerships with BLUE MOON filmmaker Richard Linklater on the films BOYHOOD (2014), WAKING LIFE (2001) and the director’s BEFORE trilogy (1995, 2004, 2013), two of whose screenplays Hawke co-wrote. And Hawke has directed both narratives and documentaries with a focus on storytellers and artists, including his Flannery O’Connor drama WILDCAT (2023) and the documentary SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION (2014), about renowned music teacher Seymour Bernstein."
"In his latest documentary, HIGHWAY 99 A DOUBLE ALBUM, he turns his lens on the music icon Merle Haggard: “I fell in love with country music because my dad loved it,” Hawke says at the film’s start. “Country music was something we could always enjoy together.” The film retraces key events in the singer’s often troubled life, including a stint in San Quentin where, in a life-changing jailhouse epiphany, Haggard saw Johnny Cash perform."
"Hawke’s works as a writer include several best-selling books, among them Meadowlark, his second graphic novel. He adapted his first novel, 1996’s The Hottest State, for the screen. Why write? “I was very restless,” Hawke said. “I really enjoyed the buzz of being around creative people and the high of trying to talk about why we’re born and why we have to die, and so I tried to write. I thought that the experience would make me grow.” (His mother famously told Hawke after reading the first draft, “Well, you’re no Chekhov.” Hawke says he needed to hear it.)"
"“You learn very quickly that acting at its best is like music, and you’re a vocalist and a musician—that there’s a rhythm and a sound,” Hawke has said. “And you have to get inside your character’s song.” Sometimes that song might be bleak. More often than not, it is joyful. But over the course of his continually unpredictable career, Hawke makes it very hard not to stop, lend an ear ... and listen." –John Horn (TFF 2025)
The program includes a selection of clips, an on-stage interview and BLUE MOON (see opposite page) shown in its entirety.
Viewed at Chuck Jones' Cinema, Telluride Film Festival (TFF), 30 Aug 2025
CLIPREEL
Dead Poets Society
Before Sunrise
Training Day
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Boyhood
First Reformed
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