The Big Picture

• Wildcat, directed by Ethan Hawke and starring Maya Hawke, explores the life of novelist and short story writer, Flannery O'Connor through a nuanced portrayal.
• The film delves into themes of art, faith, and the pursuit of truth through Flannery's struggle with illness and ambition.
• In an exclusive interview with Ethan and Maya, the father-daughter duo discusses their creative collaboration, O'Connor's legacy, and the complexities of her perspective.

Across the dimly lit paths of Southern literature, there are a few authors who loom as large and enigmatic as Flannery O’Connor. With a piercing intellect and a sharp exploration of human behavior, the renowned writer known for biting Gothic-style narratives carved out a distinct niche for herself that continues to captivate and inspire readers today. But beyond her literary credits, O’Connor remains a figure shrouded in mystery and contradictions that rouse debate. Within this intricate realm, Ethan Hawke and Maya Hawke’s first on-screen collaboration finds its origins in their film, Wildcat. In an exclusive interview with Collider, the father-daughter duo digs into what drives their creative collaboration through the lens of a complex and fiercely independent woman.

Following premieres at the Telluride Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, Wildcat offers a layered tableau of art, faith, and the relentless pursuit of truth. Following the story of O’Connor through a vivid and assertive performance by Maya, the film finds Flannery visiting her mother, Regina (Laura Linney), shortly after her lupus diagnosis at 24 in the ‘50s. Struggling with the same disease that took her father’s life, Flannery works hard to make it as a writer, but the crisis pits her feverish imagination against reality, inviting audiences to ponder: "Can scandalous art still serve God? Does suffering precede all greatness? Can illness be a blessing?"

In an exclusive Q&A with the Hawkes ahead of Wildcat’s theatrical release on May 3, the father-daughter duo get candid about their admiration for O’Connor, the complexities of her perspective, and how a phone call influenced Ethan’s directorial feature. In addition to speaking on Wildcat, Ethan also speaks out about The Black Phone 2 news, while his daughter Maya shares details about Stranger Things Season 5 and her new record, Chaos Angel, set to release May 31.

Questions Ethan and Maya Hawke Have for Flannery O’Connor Today

COLLIDER: I’m so excited about Wildcat. It’s a striking, innovative film. But right off the bat, I would love to ask, as a movie that stems from a shared appreciation for Flannery O’Connor, who would have celebrated her 99th birthday this past March, if you could ask her one question today, what would it be?

ETHAN HAWKE: “What’s it like to be dead?” No — that’s a great question.

MAYA HAWKE: “Do you like our movie?”

ETHAN HAWKE: She has a very funny quote I couldn’t stop thinking about while we were making the movie, which was, [that] Gene Kelly had made a movie of one of her short stories, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, and somebody once asked her about it, and she said, “Well, I can imagine it would be possible that it could have been worse.” [laughs]

MAYA HAWKE: It was heartbreaking.

ETHAN HAWKE: So I often thought that’s probably what she’d think of our film, too.

MAYA HAWKE: But what would I ask her? I don’t know. An amazing thing about artists and people who dare to put their imagination out into the public — I have a lot of questions to ask, like, my great grandmother or something like that — is that they answer a lot of the questions that you would have to ask them within their work. But I would be very curious to ask her about how she thought she’d changed throughout her life, the life that she had. Like, how did she feel about her young self, and how did she feel she had grown within the time that she was on this planet? I would be really interested in that. But a lot of the other questions that I would have for her about, you know, what she thought about living in the South, what she thought about God, what she thought about being a woman, what she thought about her time period — she answers a lot of those questions within her work.

ETHAN HAWKE: She’s also so not interested in answers. She’s more interested in questions.

MAYA HAWKE: Yeah. I would ask her, maybe, about rejection. I mean, if I got to have a long question for her, I would ask her about how she handled rejection so well.

ETHAN HAWKE: That’s it. That’s what I would ask her.

MAYA HAWKE: How did she stay so tough?

ETHAN HAWKE: How was she so tough and so disciplined and so ferocious? We live in a culture in which we’re all desperate to be liked and have people understand us, and she was never liked and never understood, and yet she just got more rigorous.

MAYA HAWKE: More herself.

ETHAN HAWKE: And more eccentric, and I so admire it.

MAYA HAWKE: She never tried to filter herself through a commercial lens.

ETHAN HAWKE: Never changed her writing despite bad reviews, despite not being published. She just stayed true to her guns, and I admire so much how you develop that kind of inner fortitude.

The Phone Call That Influenced Ethan Hawke’s ‘Wildcat’

Maya, I’ve read interviews where you said that you brought this project to your dad. What was it about this one that you wanted it to be the first of many that you would collaborate on?

MAYA HAWKE: Well, my dad was going through an interesting thing in his life — [Maya turns to him] I’m gonna talk for you. When he was a younger man, he was extremely dedicated to his spiritual development and growth and religious studies and learning. He even considered becoming a monk at one time.

ETHAN HAWKE: Well, I applied to the seminary. That’s true.

MAYA HAWKE: He had been going through and talking to me on the phone a lot about turning 50, and realizing that he felt that he hadn’t deepened his understanding since then, that he had this intense period of study and then felt that he had stagnated in the deepening of his spiritual life. So that’s one phone call, and then another phone call a couple of months later was this epiphany that he had, actually, and it was by dedicating his life to the arts. He had been growing his spiritual life because the arts were his form of religion and connection to something greater than himself. He makes this joke that he used to take me to the Film Forum Jr. on Sundays at 11 instead of church all the time, but it’s not exactly a joke. It’s true that, the way in which we talked about theater and poetry and plays and films and books was with a spiritual reverence, and seeing that they were an exploration of what it means to be human, what we’re supposed to do on this planet, what are the greater powers that shape us, and that those are the same questions that you ask when you are talking in a more faith-based way.

So, when he came to me with that, and after I’d had this conversation with Joe Goodman, who was the man who wonderfully had all the rights to Flannery’s letters and stories, I thought, “Well, that’s really why I’m interested in Flannery.” Why I’m interested is because of this intersection between her desire to be a great artist and her desire to be a great Christian, and the ways in which those things conflicted for her at one point in her life and then became wed. So, it seemed extremely obvious, both because we’ve been talking about A Prayer Journal since I was 15 and reading it out loud together, and talking to each other and editing her letters into a monologue for me to perform. We’d already had this relationship with it. And it seemed very clear to me that the only person in the world I knew who was actively in the practice of thinking about those kinds of things was the man sitting next to me here [Maya turns to her dad]. It just felt extremely extraordinary, right? Does that make sense?

ETHAN HAWKE: That’s the answer to the question.

How Ethan and Maya Navigated Flannery O’Connor’s Controversial Complexities

Ethan, given that O’Connor’s works have been celebrated and criticized, how did you navigate the complexities of respecting her perspective while also considering the diverse perspectives of modern audiences?

ETHAN HAWKE: By thinking like a scientist. Whenever you talk about the history of America, you’re gonna come across the crimes and sins and wounds of American life. So, if you want to avoid those crimes, sins, and wounds, you just have to stop talking. I feel like we have so much to learn by studying where we come from and the people that came before us, and so I decided that I wasn’t interested in defending her. I think she was a racist. I think America is racist. Racism, from my experience, is a product of ignorance, inexperience, and a lack of exposure. That’s where bigotry really stems from. So, the conversation is valuable. I decided that I would use her writing and use her thoughts and let her speak for herself. To a large extent, the screenplay was curated rather than written. Shelby [Gaines] and I really worked with her letters and her essays and her journals and her stories to tell her story. So, if we have a hot chance of her liking the film up there in heaven, it would only be because she wrote it. Better like it.

MAYA HAWKE: Also, we as a family had a conversation about whether or not it made sense to make this movie in this time period. We talked about the fact that films don’t have to be about good people and that there are lots of films about complicated and corrupt men.

ETHAN HAWKE: There’s a long history of cinema and men being really dynamic, rich, complicated, nuanced, flawed, compromised human beings. When making a movie about a woman, they always want the woman to be so likable or a witch.

MAYA HAWKE: Yeah. Then, we had a lot of conversations where we talked about America, about Flannery being a recovering racist, America recovering from racism, and we talked for hours. Then we realized that we were extremely interested in the conversation that we were having and that was a conversation we actually weren’t afraid to have with you; we weren’t afraid of the movie to have with whoever went to go see it, and that we wanted, actually, people to leave and talk about it, even if it was talking about how we failed. We are becoming, as a country, so dogmatic and so afraid to really engage in complicated conversations, and anything that instigates them seems like something I would want to be a part of.

Being a sociology student, there was so much to appreciate about human complexities and behavior. I loved the opening quote from O’Connor, and I felt like it set the film’s tone and the understanding of her struggles in the culture she grew up in. I’m not gonna spoil it for people, but what insights — when we’re talking about the audience and them understanding things — do you hope that they gain from the relationship between fiction and reality, and the pain of faith?

ETHAN HAWKE: Well, I think a great many of us are really apprehensive about engaging in a conversation that involves the word “God.” We are worried that somebody has an agenda with us, they’re going to proselytize to us, or they’re gonna expose some perceived flaw in us. In the history of movies, the church is often treated as there for exorcisms or they’re the bad guy, or they’re trying to sell you bibles. I love Ms. O’Connor’s work because she’s so devout and so seeking and never proselytizing. I really wanted the movie to do the same. I really like that conversation, we’re just always so scared to have it. I just wanted to say, “Hey, here’s an interesting woman. Think about what she was going through, and what does that mean to you?”

A lot of her stories are oddly upsetting, and then you want to read them again because you’re not sure you got it. You’re not sure it made sense and you’re not sure what it was communicating, but you can tell that she is sure. So, we tried to make a movie that did the same. We knew what we were trying to communicate. The word “mystery” was incredibly important to her, that ultimately life is extremely mysterious. What is good and what is bad, and what is righteous and what is sin is very confusing in the tactile world. She was engaging with that mystery, and so I wanted the movie to be as mysterious as possible.

MAYA HAWKE: There’s been this massive rise in atheism, like, led by America. I was reading about it recently. But there’s also, now, this kind of pushback on that led by young people who feel that the world is an extremely scary place, which has to do with media and exposure to world news, and has to do with, actually, the fact that the world is a really scary place. It’s a complicated question to target, but people are, I’m finding even in the conversations that I’m having, and I’ve read some stuff about it, that there is a newfound desire to look for something greater and more powerful, or something to give you direction and structure, and that’s what people have gotten from religion for a really long time.

Most wars were fought over religion. There are lots of obvious flaws in religion that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about in recent history, but there’s also a lot of pros from it. I was really interested in exploring a young woman who was extremely devout. I’m not, but I’m very curious, and I’m curious about the shape that it can give to one’s life.

How Ethan and Maya Hawke Influenced Each Other on the Set of ‘Wildcat’

As someone who cherishes the father/daughter dynamic, I just love seeing you guys in interviews. I love seeing you out and about. I’m fascinated by that level of trust in one another, especially in a project like this. For both of you, what is the one aspect of each other’s direction and performance that you appreciated on set, that allowed you to dig deeper into your respective roles that wouldn’t have been possible without the other?

ETHAN HAWKE: I have tremendous faith in Maya’s compass. Maya’s incredibly intelligent, and a great bullshit detector, and she’s a great actor. One thing that always turns me on about actors is when they have a real passion to explore something. We’re not doing an advertisement for Flannery, or selling her or anything — it’s a character that is really compelling and interesting. I remember as a young person, when I first read A Good Man is Hard to Find, I was certain a man wrote that. Somebody told me it was a woman and I corrected them. She didn’t write like Jane Austen or Louisa May Alcott or Emily Dickinson or Margaret Mitchell. She was ferocious. There was something incongruous about the intensity and fire with which she wrote and the pictures of her in little dresses and crutches and the glasses, and I really just wanted to know her. And Maya had to fire a play her, so I was like, “Let’s get to know this woman.”

MAYA HAWKE: The biggest relief of working on this movie was being directed by an actor I respect so much, and knowing that if he thought that we’ve gotten it, I was genuinely confident that we could move on. You know, there’s a lot of the times where you’re on set and they’re like, “Alright, we’re ready to move on,” and you’re like, “I don’t know if we got it, actually,” or, “Maybe I could do better.” He’s my toughest critic and my biggest supporter, and I knew that if he thought that I had done my best, then I had, and we could move on. Having that kind of trust in the process and in your director was extremely inspiring and very relaxing.

That’s one thing. I mean, there’s 1,000 things I could say. I could talk about staging and blocking, and that I’ve never worked with a director who staged cinematic scenes, like theatrical scenes, and allowed for the flow of the performance to actually make sense. The staging is so important. Recently, I went up to the director, and was like, “Hey, why am I picking up this vase and moving it over before I open those curtains? I think I would just duck behind this cabinet and open those curtains.” They were like, “It looks cooler when the vase gets picked up first.” And you’re like, “Okay.” But working with my dad, he’s like, “Yeah, why are you doing that? You’re right. We shouldn’t do something that you wouldn’t actually do.” And that’s an amazing thing about being directed by an actor, and an actor you respect. There are a million things I could say that I loved about working with him, but that’s the first thing that popped into my mind.

Maya Hawke Says ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Is “Extremely Exciting”

I’d love to shift gears a little bit. Maya, everybody loves you so much from Stranger Things, and I know you cannot spill anything about it, but I’m wondering if you’ve had a chance to read the final scripts, and what your reaction was towards whatever you’ve read?

MAYA HAWKE: I haven’t gotten to read the final scripts yet, so I haven’t had a reaction. And I actually genuinely know nothing about the last two episodes of the show. I do know what happens before then, and it’s extremely exciting. It’s always wonderful when a riddle of a world that gets built starts to get resolved and starts to be answered. It was mind-bogglingly wonderful for me, and I think audiences will feel that way too. It’s an emotional thing to go into filming this last season, so I’m excited.

Also, you have Chaos Angel coming out. One of our editors at Collider, Emily Bernard, is a huge fan of yours, and she really wanted me to ask you, what was your favorite song on that album or the hardest one to record? What was a very emotional one, if you had one?

MAYA HAWKE: Well, I can connect it back a little bit, which is that there’s a scene in Wildcat where Flannery talks about wrestling with her guardian angel, and that’s where the theme and title for the album came from, and where the last song, “Chaos Angel,” the title track, came from. I was deeply moved by that idea and by what a true human quality it is to not only ignore but fight against your best self. Whether you see your guardian angel as a real higher power or as a version of your best self or, whatever it is, as human beings we are constantly, even in the way that we consume alcohol and watch television, we’re actively trying to mute and dampen our experience of being alive. Everybody does it. I do it. It’s a weird thing about being a person. Flannery inspired me to explore that from the point of view of the guardian angel themselves, and what that would be like. So, that’s one of my favorite songs on the record, and it’s deeply connected to the movie that we made together.

ETHAN HAWKE: It’s such a wild idea to fight with your guardian angel. Getting in fistfights, rolling around the room, and fighting her guardian angel.

MAYA HAWKE: It’s such a wild image. It really, really got to me.

Ethan Hawke on Working With Scott Derrickson for ‘The Black Phone 2’

Ethan, I’m not gonna let you go before I ask about The Black Phone sequel. What was your reaction when you found out that we were getting part two? You were very convincing as a bad guy in that.

ETHAN HAWKE: What Maya said about directors, it’s really true. Scott Derrickson, I had a really wonderful experience making up my first scary movie with him. We did a movie called Sinister, and he’s just a real filmmaker. I love the way he thinks about film and storytelling. And as I get older, I really enjoy working in different genres as an actor. It’s a way to change yourself as a performer by trying to learn the math of what makes a great romantic comedy, what makes a great art film, what makes a great horror film, [and] what makes a great Western. There’s a certain geometry to all that, and Scott is brilliant at that. So basically, if he wants me to be in The Black Phone 2, I’m gonna do it.

Wildcat is now in limited theaters nationwide. For more showtimes, head to the film’s official site.

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