Wild cat, directed and co-written by Ethan Hawke and starring Maya Hawke (Strange things, little women) as Flannery O'Connor, opens this weekend in New York and LA. One of the nation's most evocative, brilliant and ambitious writers, O'Connor was diagnosed with Lupus at age 24 and reluctantly settled with her mother, played by Laura Linney, on a dairy farm in Georgia, continuing to write until he died in 1964 at the age of 39. Growing up in the Jim Crow South, where her work is set, she described cruelty and hypocrisy in brilliant prose.
The film premiered in Telluride and debuts theatrically this weekend in New York and LA via Oscilloscope. Four-time Oscar nominee Hawke spoke with Deadline on Wild catthe story of the author's story, how it weaves between the author's life and her fiction, and the current challenged state of indie film – “It's never been easier to make an independent film. It's never been harder to get someone to watch it.” (The Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity.)
DEADLINE: Flannery O'Connor is an extraordinary, perhaps underrated, writer. Her story “Good Country People” shocked me years ago when I first read it. How did you come to her and this film?
ETHAN HAWKE: It's really a kind of intergenerational movement. My mother sold textbooks in Atlanta, Georgia, when I was a child, and she fell in love with the writings of Flannery O'Connor when we were down there. So I grew up in a family where I thought she was extremely famous, my mother talked about her so much that I thought everyone read Flannery O'Connor. Maya discovered it for herself through a brilliant English teacher in high school. It gave us something to talk about together, we just both enjoyed it. And then how Foreign things started to explode, and Maya became more and more interested in taking responsibility for the kinds of things she puts into the world, she approached me about making this film. It was kind of amazing that I had talked about Flannery O'Connor with my mother, and now I was talking about her with my daughter. It's been a long road.
DEADLINE: So when you decided to do it, it was hard to figure out how? She was very isolated.
HAWKE: She fell ill very young and spent most of her life trapped in her home with her mother. She told someone once that if anyone tried to write a biography of me, it would be very boring. And I thought, yeah, if you don't want to make a film about the power of imagination and what can be achieved with imagination, that would be a great starting point for such a film.
DEADLINE: By shifting the action back and forth from her real life, to her stories?
HAWKE: Right. You raised 'Good Country People'. She herself has said that this is her most autobiographical story. I chose the ones that really explored her relationships, especially with her mother. so we're seeing a continuity of characters as this movie unfolds. [In ‘Good Country People’ a creepy bible salesman seduces a disabled woman and steals her wooden leg.]
DEADLINE: What did you find most attractive about her?
HAWKE: Like many people, we don't know the right place to set ambitions. You know, what's ambition in service if it's really only in service to make yourself seem more important. That doesn't seem like a cause worth living for, and she was really struggling with that. She was extremely ambitious. She didn't just want to be a writer. She wanted to be Tolstoy. And that seemed extremely arrogant to him. And this was contrary to the humility she was striving for in her religious life. And I find it very compelling and really interesting.
DEADLINE: O'Conner was bold in her portrayal of the Jim Crow South. But some of her private letters contained racial epithets. What do you think about this?
HAWKE: All this talk is interesting, but this country is a racist country. You can't tell America's story without stumbling into these scars. And the people in the generations before us grew from this land and all those scars are self-evident when you go back and explore it. Not everyone is Martin Luther King. Not everyone is a champion, but that doesn't mean their lives don't have something to offer us. Alice Walker said “A country does not throw away its genius”. I thought that if Toni Morrison and Alice Walker can find their way to forgiveness, I think some of us lesser souls can. [Both are admirers of O’Connor’s writing.]
DEADLINE: What was it like working with your daughter?
HAWKE: It was wonderful. I love acting and I love it when an actor has a strong passion to perform and do something, and hits a character. She approached me with this idea—the idea that she'd spent her life watching movies about men being complicated, nuanced characters who weren't meant to be likable. The entire film would be about their relationship with themselves and their work. And she says, 'I'd like to see a film about a young woman who has the same faith.' I found it very convincing. And she's at a place in her career where, you know, I'm working with my grown daughter. [Others have done it – he mentioned John Huston’s The Dead, written with son Tony Huston and starring daughter Anjelica Huston, one of Hawke’s favorite films.] If you really take it seriously, you can build on shared enthusiasm and, like a good group, you can use your intimacy to dig deep to make something worth people's time. And that's what Maya and I wanted to do.
DEADLINE: Is there anything difficult for him?
HAWKE: It's a little hard to go public with him. Release of the film. You know, the fear about … a relationship that is so sacred [being used] to promote a movie. And that's the only part that's awkward. The actual creation of it was just one of the best times of my life.
DEADLINE: The film opens this weekend in New York and LA before expanding, are you heading to it?
HAWKE: I'm just taking the month of May and traveling around the country doing Q&As in different cities. If you want to release a unique film, you have to do it in a unique way.
DEADLINE: I saw you did a handful of shows before the weekend started, often sold out. Are they Flannery O'Connor fans??
HAWKE: I don't know who cares about cinema anymore. I don't know who cares about literature anymore. But I know it is. And so I'm interested to see. I'm just going all over the place talking about the movie. And I will see if anyone is interested.
DEADLINE: What are your feelings about the indie film landscape right now?
HAWKE: I've been doing this long enough to know that it's always in flux. And you reach moments where things are easy, and it's easy to do interesting things. And then you get moments where it's really hard. And the ways the medium interacts with the public is changing. Broadcasting has changed everything. Covid, strikes, everything, have knocked people back.
Big money is being made [by some]. And that has some positive impacts on the community and a lot of negative ones because [there’s a] the risk of giant groupthink and turning the whole medium into McDonald's. This is fear. But I also know that whenever there is a setback, all it does is create a breakthrough. So everything is in transition. I'm happy to be doing a job I believe in. But I do not know. Like everyone else, I wake up in the morning reading articles about it.
How is the interesting work going? Is it happening on air? What is the future of independent film? It's never been easier to make an independent film. It's never been harder to get someone to watch it. It's really hard for producers. People can easily lose their shirt trying to take risks. But if we don't take risks, we really sacrifice a lot. The job of the artistic community is to foster interesting conversations. But if you don't earn people's money, you can't make them. It has always been an enigma.
