Ethan Hawke’s single favourite take from his career
Ethan Hawke’s career has not followed the typical blueprint laid out for Hollywood stars. He started young, appearing opposite River Phoenix in the 1985 science fiction comedy Explorers when he was 15 before reaching a larger audience as one of Robin Williams’s eager students in Peter Wier’s Dead Poets Society four years later. Although he could easily have thrown himself into the pipeline that leads to predictable blockbusters, he set a precedent early on for choosing independent movies and risky studio ventures.
Shortly after Dead Poets Society, Hawke attached himself to the young Richard Linklater, appearing in the Before trilogy, Waking Life, and Boyhood. Even the big-budget films he made were off the beaten path. Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca continues to be a criminally underrated science fiction drama, and Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day was far from the standard shoot-em-up buddy cop movie that audiences might have expected. It earned the actor his first of four Oscar nominations and remains a highlight of his and Denzel Washington’s careers.
After four decades in show business, Hawke has performed countless scenes, but there is one that still stands head and shoulders above the rest. For anyone who has witnessed the magic of Linklater’s 1995 romance Before Sunrise, it will probably come as no surprise that the actor views it as an outlier in his career, but there is one specific scene that holds particular meaning.
The story is exquisitely simple. Jesse (Hawke) meets Céline (Julie Delpy) on a train from Budapest. He is stopping in Vienna to catch a flight back to the US in the morning. She is continuing to Paris to return to university. When they reach the Austrian capital, he suggests that, in the spirit of living life with no regrets, she spend the evening with him exploring the city. They don’t have enough money for a hotel, so they wander the streets of Vienna, arguing and bonding over the biggest and smallest of philosophical questions.
The movie came together as organically as it unfolds on-screen. They filmed it chronologically, and the director and actors rewrote the script as they went along. It was a collaborative effort, but there was one scene in which Linklater wanted Hawke and Delpy to be caught off guard. Partway through their adventure, the duo stops at a record store and crams into a listening booth. The song they hear is Kath Bloom’s ‘Come Here,’ which features the lyrics, “There’s wind that blows in from the north/ And it says that loving takes this course.”
“That’s the only time I withheld anything from the cast,” Linklater told The New York Times during a 25th-anniversary retrospective of the film. “The lyrics were in the script, but they had never actually heard the song. So you can see them really listening because they’d never heard that yearning, creaky thing in Kath Bloom’s voice that’s so moving.”
Hawke could not have been more heartfelt in his appreciation of the moment, saying, “It’s probably my single favorite take of anything I’ve been involved with.”
As Linklater said, the dawning on the actor’s faces as they hear the song and their furtive glances at each other help solidify the movie as one of the most moving, naturalistic romances ever committed to film. Their chemistry is effortless, and even though it’s impossible to predict how the film will end at that point, the scene feels like a complete love story in itself.
