Ethan Hawke on River Phoenix, Dead Poets Society, and What Makes Him Cry | Screen Tests | W Magazine

In this Screen Tests interview, Ethan Hawke talks about River Phoenix, Dead Poets Society, My Own Private Idaho, Last Tango in Paris, Patti Smith, The Killing Fields, and Born To Be Blue (The Chet Baker biopic). "Ethan Hawke has been an indie film icon ever since 1989's Dead Poets Society, which was filmed when he was all of 18. Since then, he's gone to star in enough cult landmarks to ensure his stature among several generations of cinema-goers, whether their formative emotional investment is in Dead Poets Society, Reality Bites, Before Sunrise, or Boyhood, an Oscar-nominated film 12 years in the making. Along the way, he's written and directed his own projects, as well as numerous collaborations with his longtime friend, the director Richard Linklater. Tireless as ever, Hawke is still showing his range in 2016: as the famed jazz musician Chet Baker in the recent biopic Born to Be Blue, and as a gunslinging cowboy in the upcoming blockbuster shoot'em up The Magnificent Seven. For our Royals portfolio, we paired Hawke with another Texan actor, Tye Sheridan, who is still 19 but might go on to eclipse Hawke eventually, having already worked with Terrence Malick, Jeff Nichols, and David Gordon Green to great acclaim. How did Born to Be Blue come about? It came about in a very mysterious way in that about 15 years earlier, Richard Linklater and I were going to make a movie about Chet Baker. I’d been workshopping it, we were working on the script and we’d go to jazz clubs