Ethan Hawke wears many hats. The multi-hyphenate writer-director-actor returns to the Telluride Film Festival for a Tribute with Berlin prize-winner “Blue Moon” (SPC), in which he plays Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart. And Hawke is debuting his new documentary “Highway 99: A Double Album,” a two-parter devoted to the life and music of Merle Haggard, which will likely sell to a streamer as it hits the festival circuit. And showing at the Toronto International Film Festival is a new series debuting on FX September 23, “The Lowdown.” After all his recent efforts, Hawke, who has four Oscar nominations (three for collaborating with Richard Linklater), is ready to just talk. “I’m exhausted,” he said over breakfast in Telluride.
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Hawke has always loved music, and has learned a lot over the years from playing trumpeter Chet Baker (“Born to Be Blue”) and directing the music movies “Blaze” and “Seymour: An Introduction.” That one debuted at Telluride in 2014. “Seymour was my midlife crisis, right?” said Hawke. “It’s an old Shaker expression, but to master a craft, you have to apprentice three that surround it. My real mission is performance. That’s what I’ve done my whole life. That’s where the rubber meets the road. But learning about directing, learning about writing, learning about music, learning about these other things helps. It’s all connected.”
His two Telluride movies are united in that they’re both about songwriters, “two of the greatest American songwriters in the history of America,” he said. Lorenz Hart had partnered with Richard Rodgers on such American songbook faves as “Blue Moon” and “My Funny Valentine.” Hawke’s love for Merle Haggard was embedded from his youth. “For most of us, the music that our parents played is somewhere deep inside us forever.”
His dive into Haggard follows “The Last Movie Stars,” about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, “my love letter to my own profession,” he said. “In thinking about what to do next, I love making documentaries, because it’s something you can work on slowly. When I was younger, I used to try to write prose, and I wrote some books because I needed a job to sustain the imbalance of an actor’s life. In the last few years, documentary has replaced that part of my life. Before I work on Larry Hart, I’m working on Merle Haggard. Then I take a break. I disappear for 8-10, weeks. I play Larry Hart, and then I come back into me again, and I’m talking about my childhood and my loves and things that are personal to me, and it helps keep me balanced.”
“Highway 99” is Hawke’s love letter to music. “I knew that whoever won the election, half the country was going to be despondent. Merle Haggard always wrote about people. He continued his whole life to never write from a left wing or right wing point of view, but from a humanist point of view. Country music is a place where men can express their feelings, where they often struggle, and it’s a really safe place to talk about what’s going on inside you.”
The two-part documentary digs into, among other things, the unrequited love story between Merle and Dolly Parton. And Hawke got to recruit some of his favorite singers to interpret Haggard’s songs. He asked them which songs they wanted to sing, and Nora Jones, Valerie June, Steve Rowe and others picked them. “I thought I could tell his life as a musical,” said Hawke. “I could use his own writing to tell his own story.”
When it came to his ninth collaboration with Richard Linklater, “Blue Moon,” Hawke’s music movies helped him to prepare for Larry Hart. “Things like studying jazz for Chet Baker, studying the piano with ‘Seymour,’” he said, “studying the pain of trying to be a songwriter through ‘Blaze.’”
The pain of Lorenz Hart comes through in this achingly sad story set at the end of Hart’s partnership with Rodgers (Andrew Scott). It all takes place at Sardi’s on the opening night of “Oklahoma!” — which Rodgers composed with Oscar Hammerstein II instead of Hart, sealing their split. “If you are feeling a lot of pain,” said Hawke, “there’s this idea that success or approval from others is going to quiet that pain or bandage it. But in the history of mankind, it never does. He’s heartbroken about Rodgers. He’s setting himself up, and he’s distracting himself that he’s in love with this young woman [Margaret Qualley], and he’s not even heterosexual. But he can’t deal with the real pain that’s happening. He can’t look at it for a second. That movie is about a man who died of heartbreak. The alcohol was part of his sadness, the pain was too great to suffer without it. Alcohol is a painkiller.”
The movie starts out with Hart walking out of “Oklahoma!” and ponying up to the bar at Sardi’s, where the bartender (Bobby Cannavale) tries to keep his drinking under control. Hart is a great talker, the words flow out of him like butter. Hawke has to sustain the rhythm and cadence of long speeches. And theater vet Cannavale, who had bonded with Hawke on “Hurly Burly” when they were both going through divorces, was there for him on “Blue Moon,” running lines. “He was my de facto acting coach,” said Hawke.
Hawke was a “monk” during production, he said. “I would just sit in my dressing room and listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing Rodgers & Hart songs over and over again. If you listen to the music, you start to realize how well the script is written, because the script functions like a Larry Hart song. It’s so funny and absolutely heartbreaking and poignant and witty and irreverent and lewd. So I started looking at that first monologue as the lyrics to the song. Rick [Linklater] was going to be Rodgers. Rick was going to write the music and build it and make sure it was sculpted right, and make sure it was presented right.”
Nailing this performance was about words. “This guy doesn’t walk and talk like me, so it’s voice and speech,” said Hawke. “He speaks in complete sentences. He speaks with clear ideas. It always has to be the perfect word choice. It had to have the language.”
But it was also movement and body language. Hart was short, with a hideous combover. “I grew my hair really long and then shaved the middle so that I could do the combover,” said Hawke, who is just under six feet. “A combover is about the most unflattering look that men have ever come up with. So what happens immediately is your own self-esteem drops, because everybody starts looking at you, talking to you differently. We did all these old school stagecraft tricks to make me smaller.”
They built a trench in the floor and he bent his legs inside wide pants. “When you do a scene with Margaret Qualley when you’re a foot shorter than her, is different than being two inches taller than her, because she doesn’t take it seriously.”
Luckily, Hawke had a decade to get used to the movie. Linklater gave it to him when he was in his early 40s and said, “when you’re old enough, we’re going do it.” They’d get together every couple of years and do a reading of the screenplay, Hawke said, “and we’d prune it and tweak it and talk about it.”
The actor didn’t feel any anxiety about it until just before shooting in Ireland. “Then I realized that this movie was going to put Rick and me up against the wall of our talent,” he said. “The bullseye in this movie is so small. There’s so many ways to go wrong. One room, real time. Larry Hart is dying.”
Also, the movie was filmed fast. “Rick had to be incredibly decisive and clear,” said Hawke. “We didn’t have a big budget, no budget, but luckily, we didn’t need one. We needed ideas and great actors. I knew if the guy playing Rodgers wasn’t phenomenal, the movie wouldn’t work. That was the biggest challenge.”
In just a few quick scenes during the after party, the movie establishes the relationship between these former partners who are both grieving the breakup. “There’s a certain Lennon-McCartney to Rodgers and Hart,” said Hawke. “For these two people who are that creative together for that long. It’s a high level of intimacy.”
But Rodgers is moving forward, while Hart is descending into alcohol. Hawke had long admired Scott, who also comes from theater. Qualley does not, but they all rehearsed the hell out of it and it all came together.
Next up: Sterlin Harjo’s FX series “The Lowdown,” in which Hawke plays a renegade truth-teller. “I got to have this character built for me by this brilliant young man,” said Hawke. “And I had so much fun.”
