by Gill Pringle at the 19th Zurich Film Festival
Maya didn’t want him to co-star – she actually wanted him to direct the film, having optioned the rights to use O’Connor’s work.
“It was a very beautiful situation that gave birth to this film, which was that years ago when Maya was 15 or 16 years old, she discovered Flannery O’Connor on her own,” says Hawke, 52, who previously worked with his daughter on TV series, The Good Lord Bird.
“She had come across this little thin book called Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journal which was her journal to God around ages 18 to 22. And she was a young woman growing up in the Jim Crow South, a very turbulent time in American history, and she was acutely aware of the hypocrisy around her about Christian values and she had this arresting mind. And I think Maya found it very engaging because she’s clearly brilliant and has a lot to offer the world,” he says of the celebrated novelist who was just 39 years old when she died in 1964.
Often writing in the Southern Gothic style, the books and short stories reflected her Roman Catholic faith and often featured grotesque characters.
“But Flannery was also clearly in tremendous self-doubt, a lot of insecurity about what the nature of ambition is and what does it mean. Are you really in service of the art form? Are you in service of the reader? Are you in service of yourself? Are you in service of your faith? What is the motivating desire behind working in the arts? And I think as a young person, Maya found that extremely compelling to the point where when she was 18 and auditioning for a performing arts school, she carved a monologue out of the prayer journal that she did for my wife and I in the kitchen at our house,” recalls Hawke, who made his directorial debut with Chelsea Walls 21 years ago, going on to direct The Hottest State and Blaze.
“It was very beautiful and Maya edited together these different pieces of the prayer journal into a monologue and I think from that point forward, she began to see this character as, for lack of a better word, a kind of spirit guide.
“When Stranger Things came out, she started to have success and looked into getting the rights to Flannery O’Connor and wanted to make a movie about her. She approached my wife [Ryan Shawhughes] and I – who run a small production company – and told us she had the rights and said, ‘I want you guys to help me make this movie’. How are you gonna say no, right? You’re gonna say yes, and that’s the birth of it,” says the actor talking to us at the 19th Zurich Film Festival where Wildcat screened.
Co-starring Laura Linney, Hawke’s father-and-daughter film is titled Wildcat after one of Flannery’s short stories.
Focusing on just a few months of O’Connor’s life, Linney and Maya play multiple characters from the novelist’s stories with cameos from Liam Neeson, Vincent D’Onofrio and Alessandro Nivola.
“Flannery didn’t write populous novels and she wasn’t a best seller. She was an artist, and wrote in a very peculiar style that was really born out of the south and how she had been diagnosed with lupus when she was about 24. Her father had also died of lupus, so we centred the movie around a couple of months in her life around this moment when she thought she was going to die. She did in fact die of lupus – but she thought she had only months to live. In fact, she lived another decade or so but her writing is infused with a sense of mortality, that she carried with her from a very young age of not knowing whether she had six months to live. So, she looked at daily life in a different way than a lot of us do,” says the multi-hyphenate actor who is also a novelist, graphic book writer, producer, documentarian and theatre director.
In fact, working with his daughter Maya was largely inspired by his experience directing 2022 TV documentary series, The Last Movie Stars, about the lives of legendary Hollywood couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
“In the process, I got to interview Martin Scorsese – who had directed Paul Newman in The Color of Money – and I asked him why he thought Paul Newman had survived when so many people fall prey to the trappings of celebrity and the trappings of isolation and hyperbole and their egos get overblown and they trip all over themselves,” he recalls.
“And I loved his answer. He said it was because of Joanne and that they worked together all the time. And when you work with someone you love, it keeps you very close to love. And it keeps you very close to what makes you want to do this in the first place. So, to get back to what Maya loved about the Prayer Journal – all those questions about: Are you doing it to be a big shot? Are you doing it to be noticed? Are you doing it so that other people think you’re fabulous? Or are you trying to support the art form itself? And Scorsese talked a lot about his early films and of course his best friends happened to be Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Joe Pesci, who are extremely talented. But he said, when he’s working now and working with other people, he tries to see them with the same love that he felt for his best friends when he was starting out.
“I say this because it’s extremely easy to direct your daughter; the love is there. And I’m watching not just our love, but the love of performance and the love of writing. In this case, this film is largely a celebration of the power of literature, but when love is in the room, then all those lesser powers are diminished,” he says.
Linney proved an invaluable resource while making Wildcat. “Inviting Laura in was the best thing I think I did as a director and thankfully she said yes. But she’s also a great leader, and leads with her own discipline – teaching Maya about what to expect from the hair and makeup trailer. Or teaching Maya about how to deal with the AD department and how to make sure you arrive on set prepared. Just these nonverbal cues that are so essential as a young person coming up in the Arts, so Laura was a great leader in that way.”
Summarising why it was such a joy to work with his daughter, Hawke says: “It’s impossible to be near her and not be a part of some spiritual ground that is hers. She’s kind of naturally always been a poet. If you know her music, she’s just a very ethereal deep, substantive young woman. It’s easy to work with her,” he says of his daughter who has also co-starred with her mother Uma Thurman in thriller The Kill Room.
Clearly delighted at his daughter’s success, Hawke’s own career isn’t too shabby either. Just 18 years old when he made his breakthrough performance opposite Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, his other films include Reality Bites, First Reformed, Training Day, Boyhood and the Before trilogy.
