It’s the Summer of Hawke! In May, the long-awaited Before Midnight opened theaters after a successful film festival run. In June his low-budget high-concept thriller The Purge opened to $34 million. Now he closes the summer with Getaway, a car chase movie, making it the fastest, most furious way to end the summer. Hawke stars as Brent Magna, a former race car driver commanded to drive a car mounted with cameras by the man who kidnapped his wife. A girl (Selena Gomez) tries to carjack him so she’s along for the ride. We got to catch up with Hawke by phone out of the New York press junket for Getaway. It seems a lot has changed since we last spoke with him only a few months ago.
CraveOnline: I hope you appreciate the spirit in which I ask this question. Were you playing Brent as more fast or more furious?
Ethan Hawke: [Laughs] I like the question but I don’t know how to answer it.
I just think any car movie has to use that language now.
Exactly. There’s some 13-year-old boy inside every grown man, maybe not every, but that longs to know what it’s like to drive 100 miles an hour and smash into things. That little part of me is both fast and furious so I played him both ways.
Well done. Has it been a big year for you with a very personal film, Before Midnight, coming out, The Purge being your biggest box office hit I think since Training Day, and now a summer action movie?
It is. Believe it or not, The Purge actually opened bigger than Training Day. It’s always strange to me how these things work out. It’s like this year seems to be a different chapters to a life, particularly a life in the movies. For me, I think I’ve entered some other new chapter. This summer has been a lot of fun. As you said, the funny thing about Before Midnight is that movie’s a long time coming. I cowrote that movie. That movie is a big part of me and my ethos and what I believe in with cinema. I really love it.
The funny thing about The Purge is Jason Blum was my old partner. We started a theater company together when he was right out of college and I was hanging out in New York. We’ve has 20 years of hanging out and talking about movies and talking about how to beat the system. One of the things that’s remarkable about The Purge that people don’t even really talk about is we made that movie for under three million dollars. That movie cost less than Before Midnight.
Both of those movies for me are kind of 20 years of friendship and ideas, one’s an art film and one’s a genre film, but I’ve always loved all kinds of movies. This was kind of my foray into a regular job, trying to make a popcorn movie and make one that my kids would enjoy.
Knowing how Hollywood works, has this summer generated some new offers coming in for you?
You know, it really has. It’s funny, this business. I’ve seen it. Dead Poets Society came out the summer of 1989. What’s that, 24 years ago? So it’s been a long time. For me to get to make movies and continue to make relevant movies is a real sleight of hand trick. Yet, it’s totally true. If you don’t make people money, you don’t ever get jobs. The way I like to think about it is when movies are successful, it gives all the different people who secretly wanted to hire you before the ammunition to do it.
That’s great, so are we going to see you working with some new people coming up soon?
Pretty much whenever I get the opportunity, whatever success comes my way, I try to return to the people I’ve liked working with before. I’m probably going to make another movie with Andrew Niccol this year who directed me in Gattaca and Lord of War. I’m a big fan of his so I’m looking forward to the opportunity of working with him again.
In Getaway, when the cameras are mounted all over the car, inside and out, does that change your awareness of your performance because you might be captured from any angle?
That’s an interesting question. Yeah. I’ve never really loved, like a lot of directors love to roll two cameras. Maybe it’s just because in my heart of hearts I’m a stage actor. I kind of love a proscenium. I love to know where the audience is at any given moment during a movie. One of the really difficult things about this movie is I never did. They weren’t rolling two cameras. They were rolling 15 cameras all the time, all these little GoPros, all these little mounted cameras so you never had any real sense of where the audience is. What happens is you end up just having to rely tremendously on the editor.
