Ethan Hawke: Originality Requires Risking Failure | Big Think

Ethan Hawke: Originality Requires Risking Failure

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To be sure, people's physical characteristics are not entirely artifice. And understanding the deeper importance of appearance can help an actor get into character: getting their hair right, the perfect costume, and knowing that someone from New York speaks differently than a person who has lived in California their whole life. Most of the time, we expect these changes to their appearance, i.e. normal clothing and an accent not usually too far from their own. Yet reaching that deeper truth about an individual, or about life in general, typically requires departing further from what is taken for granted by an audience.

The film Boyhood, for example, was hard to pitch because it was not what studios expected: the film would take over a decade to create, shooting an actor as he grew from childhood to adolescence. Most films would only take a handful of years to make, and follow a storyline. Boyhood was just about a family growing together, and the ups and downs of family life. Pitching this experimental movie, Hawke had to risk looking a bit dumb. It is not the first time he has taken a risk as an artist — his own actions behind playing Chet Baker in Born to Be Blue involved raising his voice to a "higher octave," something that at first the director didn’t like. It was a risk Hawke decided was worth it as an artist.

That in the end was, Boyhood was made, winning Golden Globe and BAFTA Awards. In his drive to experiment and surprise, Hawke says h takes his inspiration from Allen Ginsberg, who claimed his job as a poet was to be made fun of. Ginsberg was known for singing the Hare Krishna before television hosts like Johnny Carson and William Buckley, not caring if the hosts or their audiences laughed at him for it.

Hawke says that's his favorite Ginsberg moment because, aware of being laughed at, he carried on his shtick: it is not an artist’s job to be liked, or to make money. Instead it is his or her job to be poked fun at, and challenge the idea of normal.

Ethan Hawke's graphic novel is Indeh: The Story of the Apache Wars.

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ETHAN HAWKE

Ethan Hawke is an American actor, novelist, screenwriter, and director. Hawke received Academy Award and Screen Actors Guild Supporting Actor nominations for his work in Antoine Fuqua's "Training Day," opposite Denzel Washington. In 1996, Hawke wrote his first novel, "The Hottest State", published by Little Brown and now in its nineteenth printing. Hawke's 2016 graphic novel, "Indeh: A Story of the Apache Wars," with illustrator Greg Ruth.

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Ethan Hawke: Almost every manifestation of our personality is artifice. How we dress. How we do our hair. How we speak. You know there is truth that is way beyond where you were born and what school you went to and whether you smoked Marlboro cigarettes or whether you’re a heterosexual or a homosexual. I mean there’s a greater truth of the essence of who you are and that’s the actor’s job to get through. And that can handle any accent or any wig. I mean like it’s fascinating and it’s opened up doors for me later in life as I’ve started to learn and understand what people would call character acting. And it’s opened up possibilities for me that weren’t there before. But I made a lot of mistakes turning down really good projects in this kind of knee jerk idea that I had what was the truth, you know. And I’ve come to believe that that was a lot of bullshit and self-preservation, you know.

If there was one thing that I’ve learned that I feel whatever good fortune has put me in the position of realizing this is that without risking looking like an absolute fool you cannot do anything original, unexpected. Anything that comes from your heart. You have to shed that fear of judgment and that means you may fall on your ass. And one of the wonderful things is that’s our job as members of the artistic community. Your job isn’t to succeed. Your job is to be one of many people throwing – you’re the wind at the door. You’re the wave. One wave is going to crash through and it may be you or it may be somebody else. But there’s a lot of waves that are going to add up to somebody breaking through. I mean do you think people really – look when Linklater and I were first going around trying to pitch the idea of Boyhood. I got an idea, right. We’re going to make a little short film about a little boy for 12 years. We’re going to cut it together. It will be one movie. It’ll be all about childhood. It will be....

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