NEW YORK — Ethan Hawke’s exceptional year continues with Friday’s opening of his feature film directing debut, “Blaze.”
An actor for over three decades whose hits range from “Dead Poets Society” to “Training Day” and “Boyhood,” Hawke, 47, had an acclaimed art house hit this summer as a priest enduring a crisis of faith in “First Reformed.”
Last month Hawke was praised in his return to romantic comedy as an obscure singer/songwriter caught up in a romantic triangle in “Juliet, Naked.”
With “Blaze,” Hawke profiles virtually unknown “Texas outlaw” singer/songwriter Blaze Foley, who was 42 when he was shot and killed in 1989.
For Hawke, who co-wrote the screenplay and appears as a talk radio interviewer, the idea that Foley isn’t famous was the point.
“There’s something in the subtexts of whenever you make movie about a famous person, there’s something there that their life is important because they’re famous,” he said.
“So I thought ‘Blaze’ provided me with the opportunity to do a more accurate portrait of a life in pursuit of artistic fulfillment. These other movies always seem to be about the hardships of celebrity.”
Hawke had no trouble getting “Blaze” financed, although, he said, “To make a movie about someone no one’s ever heard of, starring someone” — Ben Dickey — “no one’s ever heard of makes sense to me but not many others.”
It was because of Dickey, in fact, that Hawke made “Blaze.”
“The truth is the idea was built around Ben. He’s a friend I’ve been following a long time and really believed in. He’s a passionate and thoughtful person and for years I’ve been telling him to be an actor.
“When I had the idea to write a movie about Blaze for him, I told him I wouldn’t have made the movie without him.”
Hawke has been starring in movies since 1985 and now Maya Hawke, 20, his daughter with ex-wife Uma Thurman, is acting.
How does that feel?
“My favorite piece of writing on that is Rilke’s ‘Letters to the Young Poet’: ‘If you can do anything else you should.’
“Maya I knew from the time she was about 4 she was an artist. She was an extremely creative child and interested in empathy and people and poems and paintings. I had no idea how it might manifest, but I had no doubt she would be an artist.”
Ethan Hawke appears live at Coolidge Corner Theatre on Friday for a Q&A following “Blaze.”
