Ethan Hawke and Maya Hawke’s ‘Wildcat’ Is an Even Greater Family Affair Than We Knew
Fall festival premiere “Wildcat,” a reimagining of famed author Flannery O’Connor process writing her first novel, is even more of a family affair than originally advertised.
While the film, currently seeking distribution after premiering at both Telluride and TIFF, was executive produced by star Maya Hawke, co-written and directed by her father Ethan Hawke, and produced by his wife Ryan Hawke, actress Laura Linney, who plays O’Connor’s mother (among other roles) was the final piece of the puzzle that allowed them to produce the imaginative project.
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“There are few people in the world who, if they ask you to do something, they whisper and you show up. And Ethan is just one of those people, for me,” said Linney during a recent interview with IndieWire. (The cast of “Wildcat” received a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement to promote the film amid the ongoing strike.) She recalled when they worked together early in her career, in a 1992 revival of “The Seagull” that served as Hawke’s Broadway debut: “We were developing, uncoordinated actors when we first met. We were flailing around.”
Hawke explained the pair’s varying degree of closeness throughout their three decades of friendship. “Sometimes we’d be together, sometimes we’d be across the room together waving like, ‘How you doing? I’m still alive. Last two years were really hard.’ ‘Oh, what happened?’” The moment brought up memories of their mutual friend Philip Seymour Hoffman.
“It’s funny, I think so much about him, because whenever people think that individuals don’t matter, they really, really do. And we don’t understand how much Phil was such an essential part of the New York acting clan. And I didn’t realize it, but he was, for people like Laura and I and a lot of people in New York, he was a conduit of energy, and also he was challenging,” said Hawke. “He challenged us to be our best self. And you’d see him go, ‘Oh, you sold out on that one, huh? Don’t do that again.’ I remember he’d see Paul Dano in a play: ‘Yeah, we might have some problems there. He could be good.’”
“When he invested in you, he was invested in you,” said Linney, shedding a wistful tear in remembrance of the late icon of stage and screen, who died in 2014. Having his son Cooper Hoffman (“Licorice Pizza”) in “Wildcat” opposite Hawke’s daughter Maya “trying something really dangerous” allowed both that deep connection to the actor, and that encouraging relationship they had carry over to the next generation.
“[Art] very much leads to family. And there’s biological family, and then there’s also what Armistead Maupin calls logical family. And many of us in the arts have a curated logical family,” said Linney. “When you actually have both, when you get to witness someone who has both, who are both biologically and logically related, that’s a very powerful thing, and I find it very unusual to see. So it was incredibly moving to be on set every day, not only just to watch someone who I admire and love to watch him just evolve in these unbelievably inspiring ways, and then to watch his daughter be the beneficiary of a lifelong conversation that she has had with him. It’s an incredibly moving thing to be a part of. And so I just sat there and just soaked it all in.”
The arts have always been a way Hawke connected to her father. “There are aspects of it that were more like an apprenticeship than anything else. We would just write poems together. And he showed me so much great writing and smart people, and taught me ways to think deeply about this experience that we’re all having of being a person,” said the actress.
To that end, a particular epiphany the elder Hawke had after turning 50, “that he had made it further in his development as a spiritual thinker than he thought he had, because he’d dedicated his life to a spiritual relationship to making art,” said his daughter, is what made him the right person to helm the O’Connor movie she had been working on with Shelby Gaines, the other credited screenwriter on “Wildcat.”
“Oh, boy, this guy who I know really well has made some of my favorite movies about artists, ‘Blaze’ and ‘Seymour: An Introduction,’ and he’s really interested in the connection between spirituality and faith and art. I bet we would be a really good team to make this movie,” joked Hawke of the realization.
The actress, best known for her breakout role in “Stranger Things,” originally just wanted the rights to “A Prayer Journal,” having already collaborated with Gaines on turning one of its entries into the monologue that got her into Juilliard, but Joe Goodman, the rights holder to O’Connor’s life and works, gave her a whole treasure trove of the Georgia author’s letters, stories, etc. to work with.
“It was never a biopic,” said Hawke. “It was always more of using the gift of her language, and her stories, and her intelligence, to express something that we felt about the creative process, and about looking for a way to have your creative process be connected to and in service of something bigger than you, and to self-actualize, in whatever way that means.”
Linney was very keyed into playing her main role, saying “like Flannery, my family is from the South and Southern writer tradition,” and “being the daughter of a playwright, you can see when people write things, what bleeds through them, that is them, into the work that is just there. And you start to recognize what is equally truthful about the character being represented and the writer who’s writing it.”
However, Hawke felt she would not have been able to deliver her performance in “Wildcat” without all the years and personal investment it took to make the film. “I don’t know how I would’ve done this if I’d had the normal amount of time to prepare. If I’d had the two weeks to two days that is your normal window of preparation for a project, I don’t know if I could have done it. I spent so much time with this character,” she said.
“I knew she had this. I’ve been watching her work,” said Ethan Hawke, turning to his daughter and now creative collaborator. “It was your idea. I just needed to get a team around it to harness this energy.”
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