Ethan Hawke is Hard to Find
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Lord of The Rings gets greedy, Ben Stiller's beast, Willem Dafoe's frostbite, a triple Cannes threat, and a whammy.
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ETHAN HAWKE IS HARD TO FIND
Does suffering precede all greatness?
That’s the prime question at the heart of Wildcat, a Flannery O’Connor biopic co-written and directed by Ethan Hawke (Training Day, Before Sunrise trilogy).
Hawke discussed how he was plagued by the fear of making a boring biopic:
“We would describe this movie as a young woman dying of lupus who really wants to be a writer, but she fails constantly, and she's really unlikable, and she lives in the Jim Crow South and doesn't really deal with racism. Think it's a great idea? The answer is no.”
He continued:
“But I kept thinking about it; I think the Coen brothers would know what to do with Flannery O’Connor. She was so multi-dimensional as an artist. The aspiration for excellence was at such a high pitch.”
In the film, Hawke leaned into the Coen brothers’ style by showcasing a standout element in O’Connor’s work: violence.
In one blisteringly visceral fantasy sequence, O’Connor, played by Ethan’s daughter Maya Hawke (Stranger Things), imagines herself executed point blank.
The Hawke’s have found a window into O’Connor’s greatness by defining her duality:
O’Connor, through writing stories stained with the underbelly of human suffering, escaped her personal pain.
Wildcat is now playing in theaters across the US.
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