Ethan Hawke: Access Your Subconscious to Achieve Creativity | Big Think

Ethan Hawke: Access Your Subconscious to Achieve Creativity

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We all know the actor Ethan Hawke, star of films like Gattaca, Dead Poet’s Society, and Training Day, but have you met director, screenwriter, novelist, and philanthropist Ethan Hawke? With an energy that can’t be hushed and a curiosity that won’t quit, Hawke is a creative tornado.

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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. Hawke most recently appeared in Robert Budreau’s “Born to Be Blue,” for which he received rave reviews out of the Toronto Film Festival for his depiction of legendary jazz trumpeter Chet Baker.

In 1996, Hawke wrote his first novel, The Hottest State, published by Little Brown and now in its nineteenth printing. In 2002, his second novel, Ash Wednesday, was published by Knopf and was chosen for Bloomsbury's contemporary classics series. Additionally, Hawke's 2016 graphic novel, "Indeh," with illustrator Greg Ruth, captures the narrative of two nations at war who strive to find peace and forgiveness in a time of great upheaval.

At the age of twenty-one, Hawke founded the Malaparte Theater Co., which remained open for more than five years giving young artists a home to develop their craft. The next year, in 1992, Hawke made his Broadway debut in "The Seagull." Additionally, he has appeared in "Henry IV" alongside Richard Easton on Broadway; "Buried Child" (Steppenwolf); "Hurlyburly," for which he earned a Lucille Lortel Award Nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor and Drama League Award Nomination for Distinguished Performance (The New Group); Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia," for which he was honored with a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play and Drama League Award nomination for Distinguished Performance (Lincoln Center); the inaugural season of The Bridge Project's double billings of "The Cherry Orchard" and "A Winter's Tale," which garnered Hawke a Drama Desk Award Nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play (Brooklyn Academy of Music and The Old Vic); and "Blood From A Stone" (The New Group) which earned him a 2011 Obie Award for Performance. In 2010, Hawke directed Sam Shepard's "A Lie of the Mind," for which he received a Drama Desk Nomination for Outstanding Director of a Play as well as recognition in the New York Times and The New Yorker top ten lists of the leading theatre productions in 2010.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Ethan Hawke: When I first started trying to write – because I came on writing as an actor and you realize very quickly that there’s a big difference between being ambiguous and being vague. And being vague is out of focus, blurry, oh yeah everything’s kind of true. In being ambiguous is a little bit more than a Zen comb, you know, you’re ringing a bell towards a larger truth. And you’re guiding an audience to think for themselves rather than dictating an answer. That to me is ambiguity at its finest. For example when I worked on Boyhood with Richard Linklater there was a large component and I have no other word for it than what I’ve read about in jazz. The beauty of jazz music is that there’s no plan. There’s a plan. There’s an architecture. Let’s take something obvious like my favorite things, right. John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things. If people know one jazz thing often they’ll know that one. And he takes this famous song, da, da, da, da, da, right. And they all start riffing on it and the musicians start riffing on it and they find a new melody inside it.

And it changes and it changes. And then mysteriously comes back around again and spontaneity mixed with discipline and intelligence it evolves into something you cannot plan that is more sophisticated and more interesting than something the intellectual mind can plan. When you’re really being creative at your best you’ve used your discipline to open up your subconscious. You know, Bob Dylan has a great quote where he says, you know, I didn’t write that man. When somebody says you don’t have an idea for a song. Mama’s in the basement mixing up medicine. I’m on the pavement – that’s not like oh I got an idea for a song. Let me write the Subterranean Homesick Blues, right. It doesn’t work like that. It works like you’ve got something to say and then it’s an antenna that goes up, r...

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