Ethan Hawke Talks PREDESTINATION With WAMG

Ethan Hawke’s latest film PREDESTINATION has quite a bit of buzz surrounding it, including several wins at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. In celebration of the film opening in theaters and On Demand this Friday, WAMG sat down with Hawke in a small roundtable discussion to talk about his latest film, BOYHOOD, and time-travel. Check it out below.

PREDESTINATION chronicles the life of a Temporal Agent (Ethan Hawke) sent on an intricate series of time-travel journeys designed to prevent future killers from committing their crimes. Now, on his final assignment, the Agent must stop the one criminal that has eluded him throughout time and prevent a devastating attack in which thousands of lives will be lost.

What were your first thoughts when you read this script?

Ethan Hawke : I need to read it again. I’ve never had that feeling. First of all I wasn’t even sure what part they were offering me. ‘Am I the bartender or am I the other guy? Or wait is he a guy?’ That aspect of it was really fun. Even though I didn’t get it I knew I wanted to be involved with it because it was just so smart. It reminded me a little bit about that movie BRAZIL. You know when BRAZIL ends and you say, ‘What the hell just happened?’ But I enjoyed it. Most movies are so obvious anyway. Particularly for a person that has been making movies for a long time. I spend my life reading scripts so I get ahead of them all the time. “Oh, she dropped the pen. Oh, I get it. Forty pages now and they’ll find the pen and that’s how they’ll know.’ It gets so tedious. This I had no idea what was happening. And yet the language was so good and the ideas were so interesting. I love DAYBREAKERS too.

Were you a fan of the time travel movies in general? Do you have a favorite?

Ethan Hawke : My favorite is probably all those old ‘Twilight Zone’ episodes. They are so good and so well shot. A lot of them have to do with time travel. Somebody finds themselves out of time or in a new time. I always found them so interesting and in a way when I read this I thought, ‘You know what? This could be is a feature length of the greatest ‘The Twilight Zone’ episode ever,’ where you are like ‘Wait, what?’ Because ‘The Twilight Zone’ always had that great thing where there is some twist at the end where you are like, ‘oh they are on a different planet.’ I think those episodes from Twilight are some of the best things ever.

If you could time travel where would you go?

Ethan Hawke : I think the first thing that I would do is want to go visit my kids when they are older.

The future?

Ethan Hawke : I would want to go to the future. I want to see how they did. That would be the thing that most interests me. The past isn’t that interesting to me.

I feel like this film is so completely different to anything you have done in the past. What attracted you to it?

Ethan Hawke : Peter Michael. In a way this could be a good double feature with GATTACA. They are different but they fall into the kind of science fiction which is my favorite where they make you think. People often hear science fiction they picture STAR WARS or ray guns. I like the science fiction that gives you an excuse to talk about really sophisticated ideas. This movie is making a case for the inner connectedness of man or the masculine feminine side of every self, that we all are two halves of one masculine feminine identify and that it’s actually at war with itself through space and time. Hunting itself and until it stops hunting itself there is going to be violence. You can make a strong case that, that’s what that movie is about.

What is the difference in your performance for something like this where the theme is allegory and where those philosophical ideas are sub-text, verses something like the before trilogy where it is all text and what is begin said between the characters?

Ethan Hawke : That’s a good question. The work I have done with Linklater is naturalism too at an extreme degree. Those movies almost forfeit plot. There almost is no plot. The event of the movie is time. What time does to a family and what time does to romantic love. Time is the event. Where as a movie like PREDESTINATION there is a plot. This happens and then that happens so it becomes more straight forward story telling. Therefore, they are each hard in their own way. My work with Rick really asks me to kind of blur the line between character and performer and create a full completion of imagination so you think those people exist. In this its really more about you are the actor but your inner workings are not as important as the plot. You are part of a story that is being told so you have to see yourself as a servant to the story. It’s not interesting how my character feels about any given event if it doesn’t help tell the story. If I decide that my character is actually scared of driving, it doesn’t really help. Where as if I wanted to something like that in boyhood it’s interesting. All that stuff just helps.

You say you want to go to the future to see your kids grow up. How does fatherhood change you?

Ethan Hawke : Very hard to say anything worth reading about. Parenthood is part of life. It’s a little bit like friendship and love. All those big subjects. Fatherhood is definitely a part of who I am now. I have four kids so it’s just the context in which I see everything. The fun of working on boy hood was that there was a place to put all that thinking. I help Lorelei’s baby so I get to do scenes with her. It’s an amazing miracle in a way. What’s wonderful about it is that it makes you constantly meditate on how wonderful it is to be alive. We had this joke on set that the ad line for the movie should be ‘PREDESTINATION, go fuck yourself!’  In a lot of the buddhist theories they say if we are all traveling through time and we have all been reincarnated as our mother and each others father then we actually were our own mother at some point. We are all one living organism. When you look at parenthood from that context it’s kind of an illusion that we are ethos persons parent. We are actually part of a culture. We are part of a time period we live in. We don’t know whats happening with the planet. There is a larger thing at work. That’s what I love about science fiction. It let’s you talk about those ideas without talking about religion. Where people have those knee jerk things where ‘I’m Christian so I don’t think about that or I’m Muslim so I don’t think about that.’ It lets you just think about the idea of it.

What was your collaboration with Sarah Snook like?

Ethan Hawke : It’s hard to talk about without ruining it. When I did GATTACA one of the great pleasures with that movie was being a part of Jude Law’s performance. It was amazing. I knew this guy was the real deal and that he is going to be around forever. I felt that way about Sarah. So confident and so cool. In fact this whole movie hinges on her being brilliant. It has to be an unknown actress. It would be one thing if it was Kate Winslet, but if it was Kate Winslet the twist of the movie would be ruined and you would just watch her act as appose to falling into the story which is what Sarah gave us. I knew we had to be symbiotic but what was hard about it was to both be true to it but not give it away. That was the weird little dance. If we were too cute with it then everybody would know what was up. That’s what I mean by a lot of what we are doing is story telling. At first glance that first scene is a bartender talking to a young man walking into a bar. Well watch the movie a second time and its a different scene. You say no wait, he’s meeting himself. There is something almost moving about it. But if I play that too much the first time you watch it you will get it. I can’t let you get it the first time but I have to be true to it so that the second you get it and it becomes more interesting. This is one of the few movies that it really is better the second time you see it.

Did you have to talk with Sarah on how to talk manly and mimic you?

Ethan Hawke : Yes and no. We worked on the parts and go to play those scenes with each other. I had to do the scenes with myself at the end of the movie. I worked on those scenes with Sarah where she got to do it and I got to do the scene that she had to do with herself. She’s funny and she’s smart and she watched movies of me when I was that age. It was also not about us imitating each other but finding a larger truth to who that fictional person is.

How many times have you seen this movie?

Ethan Hawke : Well I feel like I have seen it a thousand times because I worked on it but I have only seen it twice.

Do you enjoy watching yourself on film… and going back to the older films?

Ethan Hawke : I don’t enjoy it or not enjoy it. It’s not something I do. Hopefully people will like this movie and twelve years from now I’ll see fifteen minutes of it on a television one night or someone will be doing a retrospective about the Spierigs and I’ll be there and i’ll see a part of it. Mostly I enjoy going to film festivals and seeing them with an audience for the first time. To be at the BOYHOOD screening when nobody knew that the movie really took place over twelve years. Now when people go see it they heard that. When it showed it was just an untitled Richard Linklater film and you felt the audience say ‘Wow, this kid is growing up before our eyes.’ You felt the penny drop and that can never happen again. I like seeing the DP’s (Director of Photography) work because you get so involved with it on the day. It’s funny to see which take they picked. Simple little stuff like that. ‘Oh, he went that way. I liked it better the other way.’ That aspect of watching it is fun. It’s moving for me to see scenes with River Pheonix now or Philip Seymour Hoffman. Those things are all changes over time. All of a sudden that scene in BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU’RE DEAD means something else to me. I didn’t know that would be the last time I would work with Phil. I thought it would be the first time.

In BOYHOOD you get to see yourself 10 to 12 years ago and get to see yourself change. Over those years how do you feel you have changed? Over the next 10 to 12 years what do you want to become?

Ethan Hawke : I wish I could know what I could learn ten years from now already so I didn’t have to learn it. I’m always amazed at how much stays the same. The weird thing to me about BEFORE MIDNIGHT for example and when you watch it in relationship to BEFORE SUNRISE, which was shot eighteen years earlier, how much of the character just stays the same. I mean the face is falling apart and all that stuff but the essence of the person is the same. We learn things and I feel we get better at showing our true self or we get worse at it. We either get cleaner or more twisted and I think the people that age the best are the people who kind of untwist themselves the best and the people who suffer the most get more and more twisted. Youth always covers up a lot of problems because its attractive and fun and then as you get older things get revealed.

You were talking about how the characters motions need to be in service with the plot. What do you do to make sure that human element is still present? 

Ethan Hawke : That’s being an actor. Sometimes I’ll be on a set and some actors complain saying ‘This line isn’t any good.’ You have to make it good. That’s why you are being paid. Our job is to infuse humanity in many frames as possible. That’s why it is so hard to act well in a TV show because the plot is ruling everything. ‘She found the clue. Who did it? He did it. She did it.’ There is no time to be human. If you have ever seen Vincent D’onofrio in ‘Law & Order : Criminal Intent,’ he could do it. There is all this plot yet there is human being in the middle of it. The best actors can do that. I always joke when people ask ‘Is it challenging?’ It’s never challenging to work with a good director on a great script. People say Daniel Day Lewis is great in LINCOLN. Yeah he was. He better be. It’s hard to be good in an episode of ‘Matlock.’ If you can’t be good with Tony Christian and Spielberg and those guys then you suck.

BOYHOOD got named film of the year by New York Film Critics Circle Awards. There is a lot of Oscar buzz about it as well. What is your take on that?

Ethan Hawke : I’m just in shock. I made eight movies with Rick and I loved them all. I believe in him completely and I am so happy that people are finally understanding that this is a really serious film maker of this time period. He is the most humble guy. He is so down to earth and fun to be with and he celebrates so many other people. He has championed so many young film makers. I think of his nineteen movies seventeen of them are really great. The other two are damn good. He’s really special. But I still can’t believe. I thought WAKING LIFE was genius but nobody cared about it. The before trilogies were my favorite things that happened to me and only three people saw that movie. It’s been wonderful that this movie has connected with people.

PREDESTINATION opens in theaters and On Demand January 9th