A Trainee No Longer

Congratulations to everyone who was born on Nov. 6. As birthdays go, it’s certainly turning out to be a red-letter one, at least for Ethan Hawke. This year, the stars have been unusually generous to Hawke, so shouldn’t his fellow Scorpios be enjoying a mach 2 ride as well?

“It’s the kind of year that makes me believe in astrology,” Hawke says, and then he ticks off the heavens’ economy pack of good fortune, a string of important firsts and a couple of seconds not to be sneezed at. Roan, his first son and second child with wife Uma Thurman, made his debut on the planet two weeks into the new year. “Training Day” earned him his first Oscar nomination (for best supporting actor, holding his own against best actor winner Denzel Washington) as well as a reported $12-million paycheck, bolstering his faltering relationship with Hollywood and putting him on everyone’s call-back list. His second novel, “Ash Wednesday,” about a pregnant woman who returns home to Texas with her boyfriend in pursuit, will be published by Knopf in July. And “Chelsea Walls,” his maiden voyage as a feature film director, will be released by Lions Gate on Friday.

Oh, yes. For fun, he plays piano, violin and trumpet.

“I believe that all the arts are very much different exercises, but it’s all for the same purpose,” Hawke says. “My life has been dedicated to the arts.”

Hawke’s public image is mainly that of a stand-up guy who hit the big screen at 13 in Joe Dante’s “Explorers” and went on to acclaim a mere four years later in 1989’s “Dead Poets Society.” But for most of his adult life, Hawke has also been walking the walk of a Renaissance man--or dilettante, depending on which beholder you ask. Regardless, it’s hard to quibble over the sheer force of his creative energy.

As his “Great Expectations” co-star Gwyneth Paltrow told Time Out New York a few years ago, “He’s the only one of my young artist friends who says, ‘You know, I want to start a theater company, direct a video and go to Paris and write a novel. I want to do Sam Shepard in Chicago’--and he does every one of those things.”

For a guy who’s already master of his universe at the tender age of 31, Hawke looks very much like he’s, well, the tender age of 31. Media aesthetes may periodically groom him for the screen or book jacket, but sooner or later that scrubby goatee keeps resurfacing. There it is as he slouches in a rattan chair in the courtyard of the Chateau Marmont. Dressed in a sweatshirt and baggy pants, Hawke is polishing off a somehow unsurprising stream of cigarettes and coffee.

The Gen-X diet or, at the very least, fuel for final exams? Hawke would be horrified at the thought. Films like “Reality Bites” (1994) and “Before Sunrise” (1995) may have made him the poster boy for scruffy slackerdom, but he’s nothing like the aimless drifters he’s portrayed. “That Gen-X stuff used to bug me when I was younger,” he says. “It was just a label for a time period. I don’t know that Gen X has any kind of identity outside a group of people coming of age in the ‘90s.”

Artists interest Hawke far more than slackers, and in bohemia, which artists have always ruled, an eccentric New York City hostelry known as the Chelsea Hotel may very well be its Buckingham Palace. It follows that the legendary Chelsea is the star of the New York-based actor’s first feature film as a director. With an ensemble cast of 30, “Chelsea Walls” portrays a day in the life of five alienated artists who reside within.

“The Chelsea holds a lot of mythos for people who romanticize bohemian life,” Hawke says, lighting a cigarette. “The Chelsea Hotel is like Notre Dame, so I’ve always been intrigued by it. If you’re a young kid and you walk by the Chelsea Hotel, you feel like you’re walking by all these ghosts. That hotel has been home to so many creative movements from the Beats to Warhol and his crowd and the punks, plus you’ve got Thomas Wolfe, so you have the whole Lost Generation passing through there. Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe fighting in the lobby.

“It was built as a home for artists and it really has been that, largely due to the credit of Stanley Bard, who owns the place. His father owned the place before him, and he’s kept the spirit intact. So it just always held mystique for me. And this woman [Nicole Burdette] wrote a beautiful piece that I thought had captured the spirit of it, and I thought it would make a wonderful film.”

Hawke’s first stab at movie directing was also shot at the Chelsea. Between acting jobs in 1993, he made a short film about a honeymooning couple called “Straight to One,” which screened at Sundance. (The next year he directed the music video “Stay” for onetime next-door neighbor Lisa Loeb.) Mutual friends decided he should meet Burdette, a young playwright who’d written a play about life at the Chelsea inspired by former hotel resident Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milk Wood.” But filming didn’t begin until 1999, when InDiGent Films bankrolled the $250,000 project as part of an experimental program aimed at producing digital films for IFC and Bravo.

“Chelsea Walls” breaks numerous rules of Hollywood filmmaking, yet it uses Hollywood people to do it. For a movie that Hawke boasts isn’t destined for “the malls of America,” he recruited a number of marquee names, among them his wife, Kris Kristofferson, Natasha Richardson, Tuesday Weld and Vincent D’Onofrio.

Many of the actors are in the family Rolodex, such as Hawke’s oldest friend, Robert Sean Leonard, whom he met screen testing for “Dead Poets Society.” As for ‘60s and ‘70s stars Weld and Kristofferson, Hawke went after them in hot pursuit. “I wrote Kris a note saying I wanted to make this movie and unfortunately there was only one person who could play the part and sadly, it was him,” Hawke says, recalling his pitch: “‘You see my dilemma. You have to do this movie, so please don’t turn it down without calling me.’ And then he called me. It’s hard to get a guy who’s really successful, who has a family, to really want to work for free. But he fell in love with the project.”

Kristofferson was intrigued by the chance to re-create life at the Chelsea, where he stayed when he played the Bitter End in the ‘70s, and he felt he understood the character, a writer torn between his wife, his mistress and bottles brimming with alcohol and bad memories. But as Kristofferson’s week on the set came to a close, he also found that working with the first-time director was frankly a relief.

“I really came to respect his intelligence and his dedication to his work,” Kristofferson says. “He’s a gifted writer, he’s a creative person and I felt that his passion for what he’s doing rubbed off on me. It’s interesting doing work where you’re thinking and not playing somebody who’s just running after vampires,” as Kristofferson did in “Blade II.” “And it was nice working with people who are committed to working on something that isn’t going to make a lot of money. But I’m surprised that it’s even opening, because anything that’s any good that I’m associated with doesn’t see the light of day.”

Certainly one feature of “Chelsea Walls” that might give mall theater-bookers pause is its disregard for conventional plot. The characters’ meandering days and stories meet, but only in parallel as they pass each other in the halls. They’re viewed in filmy, poetic sequences, sometimes from odd angles, through the window of a hallway door, say, or in relentlessly intimate close-ups.

“I would always joke when we were making the movie that the great lie that movies and books tell us is that your life happens in some kind of narrative sense,” Hawke says. “It doesn’t. We all feel like our lives are endlessly boring because they don’t work in this kind of beginning, middle and end way that we always get told in stories. So the movie is just a collage of moments and trying to paint a picture of a collective rather than an individual story.”

With “Chelsea Walls,” Hawke fractures time in another way. If other films have identified him as someone surfing the zeitgeist, here he’s created a world that can’t be linked to any particular moment. Hawke says that wasn’t a deliberate attempt to dissociate himself from his former persona.

“That stuff doesn’t make it onto my radar,” he says. “What excited me about the hotel is that when you’re there you can’t really tell if it’s 1960 or 1990, and if you spend a lot of time there, you start to lose track of time. So in weaving these stories together, I had the hope and belief that in the course of one day, there was the feeling that simultaneously all these people were living in different decades.”

The idea is that the Kristofferson and Thurman story lines are really taking place in the ‘60s and ‘70s, while the ‘80s are the era of Rosario Dawson’s character, a poet like Thurman’s who loves the wrong man. Leonard and Steve Zahn are Minnesota musicians who’ve just come to town in the ‘90s. The layering of time is extremely subtle, perhaps undetectable, although Hawke leaves bread crumbs for his intrepid audience by shooting each scene using film techniques identified with its particular decade.

The ‘90s section, for example was shot with hand-held cameras and available light, alluding to the austere films of Dogma directors. For the ‘80s, the filmmakers used Steadicam for long, smooth shots that encircle the action. “The ‘70s was all kind of gold and hippie-ish,” Hawke says. “Uma’s room was all hippied out and Kristofferson’s was devoid of any primary colors.”

But in any decade, the denizens are bound to be maddeningly narcissistic, unable to truly connect with those around them. For all of Hawke’s passion for the artist’s way, his paean to it sounds a fairly harsh note.

“By making a movie about it, you romanticize it a little bit right off the bat, but I try to paint an honest portrait of it,” he says. “What I love about the movie and what has always appealed to me about creative people is that these people are desperate to be heard, but they don’t listen very well. They’re filled with self-indulgence. A lot of people are, and artists are sometimes the worst breed. But it always makes me laugh, a guy dedicating his life to communicate this book and write his feelings out, but he just can’t register anyone else’s pathos.

“And it’s not just artists who are like that. I felt like you can extend that out to all of humanity, in that the hotel is a great kind of metaphor for a house where all these people are living so close together, and they’re all so lonely. They’re sitting there crying about how much they want to be understood, and they don’t invest a second in trying to understand somebody else.”

Richard Linklater, who has directed Hawke in four films, including last year’s “Tape,” says the actor’s directing debut shows integrity. “You say a lot about yourself in the first thing you do as a director,” says Linklater, who makes a cameo appearance. “It takes such an enormous effort to make any film, but especially your first. You bring a lifetime of ideas to it, and Ethan could have done a more commercial film. But I’m not at all surprised that he made this personal, small, somewhat experimental art film that really concentrates on these performances and people and poetic collage and small moments and gestures. I think it’s a wonderful movie.”

Hawke’s first renaissance role model was his stepfather, Patrick Powers, who helped raise him in New Jersey after his teenage Texas parents divorced when he was 3. “He’s a real jack of all trades,” Hawke says of Powers. “He’s a drummer and a guitar player and a piano player and a painter and a sculptor and a deeply religious man. He had that whole aesthetic that the arts are all the same thing. It’s just that I’m going to use my drums to try to do it or I’m going to try to do it with watercolor or performance. And I’ve always bought that.”

Hawke dropped out of two colleges, seeking his education instead on the job and on the stage. Film parts came steadily after “Dead Poets,” but between films he turned to the theater to hone his skills and get directing experience. In 1993, he appeared on Broadway in Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” He also co-founded a New York theater company called Malaparte. “I was 21 when I came up with the name, but there was a book that was published unbound, and the idea was that you could read it in any order. It doesn’t matter what happens but how it happens, which actually ends up being very much the spirit of ‘Chelsea Walls.’”

The film reunites a lot of Malaparte people who’ve dispersed as their careers and new families have pulled them away, among them, Leonard, Zahn, Frank Whaley and Burdette, whose work was staged by the company. “When I got married and started my own family, the thing I lost was the theater company,” Hawke says. “And so this is a way to regroup with those people and try to push the work we were doing in the theater into film.”

He also put his intimate knowledge of his film family to work. “I felt like I had the opportunity to give all of them a chance to do something they don’t normally do. I know what an incredible musician Bob Leonard is, so if I’ve got a part for a musician, I’m going to let Bob do it. Uma always gets asked to play these real uber women, and it was great to give her a chance to play an everyday human being rather than an ice princess or the queen of Nosferatu’s revenge.”

Hawke came to the project after a disappointing run acting in big-budget productions in the late ‘90s. Films like “Gattaca” (1997), “Great Expectations” (1998) and “Snow Falling on Cedars” (1999) saddled his career with a pall of box-office anemia, although “Gattaca” offered the redeeming social value of hooking him up with Thurman. In retrospect, Hawke thinks the best thing he could have done to turn on his acting pilot light was to turn to directing.

“It really turned me back on to acting,” he says. “It was so much fun working with all these actors that I got reinvigorated about acting. It was great. After I finished shooting, I went and shot ‘Training Day.’”

Hawke credits his “Training Day” co-star Washington with further raising the bar, helping him snag an Oscar nomination. “The most obvious comparison is, if you play basketball with somebody who’s much better than you, you play a lot better. I’ve never worked with somebody who has that level of confidence. I liken it to most people when they’re a senior in high school. You walk around high school, you feel confident, you do whatever you want. Denzel gets to operate to the world as though he’s a senior in high school. He’s got his act together, and he was really good to me.”

These days, Hawke’s eyes may be heavy-lidded, but it’s not from losing sleep over his medusa-like career path. It’s more likely to be because Roan is a morning person, if you consider dawn morning. Thurman had been a full-time mom while Hawke was on the job, but after a hiatus of a couple of years, she recently returned to work on the L.A. set of Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited new film. In “Kill Bill,” she plays a woman who deals with men who’ve done her wrong by killing them.

All things considered, Hawke thinks this might be a good time for intermission. “I’m all played out,” he says. “I’m at a real natural breakpoint anyway. I feel like one chapter is ending and a new one is beginning. I’ve made a movie--it’s something I’ve always dreamed about doing. I got this book off my chest and my acting career is in a place it’s never been before. So,” he says, rising from his chair to take his family to Santa Barbara for a quiet weekend, “I’m going to proceed with caution.”

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Irene Lacher is a regular contributor to Calendar.