Ethan Hawke

And I hated college.

I was miserable.

And I thought, I'll take the bus in and I'll go on one of these open casting calls again.

And if I get the part, this is what I decided, if I get the part, I'll do that.

If I don't get the part, I'll join the Merchant Marines and be like Jack London.

That was my fantasy at the time.

I remember calling my sister and saying, all right, there's seven parts.

This is how dumb I was.

I was like, there's seven parts.

If I don't get one of those, I must suck, you know?

So, which is not true at all.

But I ended up getting one of them.

And I dropped out of college and the success of Dead Poets Society sent me, you know, it was like a trajectory.

It shot me down a different course of water than I was on before.

tell you how grateful I am for that first experience.

First of all, if for no other reason than in the success of Dead Poets Society, I didn't take it seriously at all.

I didn't even realize that the movie was successful until a couple years later, because I had so braced myself for failure, perception of failure anyway.

Because of the first experience?

Yeah, because everybody's saying, oh, the movie's so great.

I'm like, yeah, they said this last time.