The Daily Beast interviewed Ethan Hawke to celebrate his year of spectacular achievement, mostly with Boyhood. Ethan has already been nominated for a Golden Globe and SAG Award, plus Ethan and the film are picking up tons of critics’ awards. The weird gamble of making a film over the course of 12 years has paid off spectacularly. Anyway, about this Daily Beast interview – it is SO GOOD. And by that I mean… I love Ethan because A) he’s a sh-t talking gossip, B) he genuinely loves film and theater and he loves to talk about it, C) he can be so bitchy and D) he’s so very verbose. I want to see Ethan and Benedict Cumberbatch in the same room, bitching and verbose-ing. Anyway, you can read the full piece here (it was published a few days ago, sorry for not getting to it sooner). Some highlights:

On early successes, Jennifer Lawrence: “Success screws people up when it happens too young. I got to meet Mike Nichols once, and he used to talk about how he had so much success so young that it screwed up his sense of what’s “appropriate.” I feel sorry for a young actress like Jennifer Lawrence who gets so much success out of the gate, because how are you supposed to develop an appropriate work ethic? How do you push yourself to be better when you get an Oscar for buying breakfast in the morning? It’s the kind of thing one wants to really work for. Tennessee Williams wrote this great essay called The Catastrophe of Success about how failure and success can both be miserable experiences, but failure can at least be fuel to inspire you to be better, while success can just drown you.”

On Woody Harrelson: “When I saw The Messenger, I thought it was our Coming Home. It’s a great film. And I’ve been a longtime Woody Harrelson fan, and it’s been amazing for me to watch him turn into Gene Hackman. He’s turning into one of those ferocious older guys. I would have never predicted when I saw Cheers that Woody Harrelson was going to be one of the great actors of this generation.

On Martin Scorsese and David O. Russell: “One example would be how fascinating it must be to be Martin Scorsese and have an Oscar at home for The Departed….[and] they f–ked him for Goodfellas. And look at last year. A lot of people made a big deal over American Hustle, and that is a very good imitation Scorsese movie, but we had an actual Scorsese movie that came out that same year! The Wolf of Wall Street is a dangerous, incendiary work of art. You leave the theater thinking, “Wait a second… I was just force-fed misogyny and awful behavior for three hours, but I’m very unsure of things.”

Actors who can never find the lightness: “Even my favorite actor of my generation, Philip Seymour Hoffman, if he had a fault, it was his tendency to, at times, focus too much on the blackness. Sean Penn does that, too. But Sean Penn’s best performances are when he’s both good and bad, like in Mystic River. But I respect Sean because he has balls for days. He’s one of the only actors today who would’ve really thrived in the ‘70s. He goes for broke, but the director rarely matches him.

His real acting hero: “But you know, I had only one other hero in my life acting and that was River [Phoenix]… And to have Phil [Seymour Hoffman] die this year… River was my young friend and my peer, and Phil was my peer, but very rarely do you have a peer who you just openly admire. River was a leader. When My Own Private Idaho came out, that was the first time somebody from our generation was contributing. He said, “Hey man, I don’t care what my agent says. I have something to say, and I’m going to play a gay character in a Gus Van Sant movie.” This was true outsider art. And Phil was a leader—in theater, and in movies. A lot of actors are good, but Phil was a fully developed artist.

A Bill Clinton story: “Speaking of weird New York moments like Wally Shawn, I was waiting in line to pee at Shakespeare in the Park and was standing behind Bill Clinton—which was already weird, waiting in line to pee behind Bill Clinton. So, we go to the urinals and he leans over to me and whispers, “I loved Gattaca.” How crazy is that!?”

Bills to pay/money talk: “I’ve tried to finance my child support and my kids’ school and all my bills with independent cinema as well, but my experiment with movies like The Purge and Sinister and Predestination is to try and make exciting genre films that are substantive, and make them cheaply enough so you actually see some back-end, as opposed to doing a Marvel movie or something. I think this way is a little more dangerous….It’s pretty hard. I don’t get paid to do Boyhood or the Before trilogy or to do Macbeth at Lincoln Center. I gotta figure out a way to pay my bills somehow! I wanted to be Warren Beatty when I was young and make one movie every three years and have it be brilliant, but the rules of the game are changing. I just feel incredibly fortunate to have met someone like Richard Linklater back in ’93 who had the same ethos as me, and wanted to make the same kind of art. Unlike Daniel Day-Lewis or Sean Penn or these “third-person” actors who can really shape-change themselves, I’ve just tried to put myself in different kinds of material to push myself to change so that I can give different kinds of performances.

[From The Daily Beast]

There’s SO MUCH more. But isn’t Ethan amazing? He’s bitchy, he’s a name-dropper, he’s a humble-bragger, he’s a snob and… it all sort of works. I love that he dared to throw a little shade on J-Law. I love that he basically called out American Hustle for being a budget Martin Scorsese film. I love that he compares himself to Daniel Day-Lewis and Sean Penn. Even if I don’t agree with him about everything, it’s refreshing to read an interview with someone who doesn’t talk in soundbytes, someone who actually thinks about art and his place in his artistic community.

Photos courtesy of WENN.