Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, Ethan Hawke. He stars in the new movie Blue Moon about lyricist Lorenz Hart, half of the Broadway duo Rogers and Hart. Hawke also appears in the new streaming series The Lowdown. Now 55, he's been making movies since he was 13. And sometimes, he says, he forgets just how old he is.
Now I'll be sent a script and it says, Billy, age 19, skateboarding down the street. And I always think, oh, that's my part. It takes me a while to realize, oh, Billy's father, age 55, gruff and weathered around the edges.
I'm like, oh, that's me. Also, we hear from actor and director Tim Robbins. He reflects on 30 years of making films and why he believes live theater can sometimes speak to us in more profound ways than film can.
I know that as a child, when I saw something transformative, something that blew my mind, I can still remember those plays. That's the power that theater has. It can actually transform a consciousness.
That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
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Chapter 2: What challenges did Ethan Hawke face while filming Blue Moon?
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This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley.
Here's Terry with our first interview. Let's start with a clip from Blue Moon, directed by Richard Linklater. It's set on the night of the opening of Oklahoma, the first musical that Hart's longtime songwriting partner, Richard Rogers, wrote with another lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein.
There's an after-party at Sardi's where theater people would go on opening night and wait till the reviews came out. Hart gets there first and talks with the bartender, feeling he's become insignificant because he was abandoned by Rogers, and he's complaining about how false and sentimental Oklahoma is.
Rogers had moved on because Hart had been drinking too much and was no longer a reliable partner. Hart claims to have become sober, but he ends up drinking a lot at Sardi's. In this scene, after Rogers arrives, he talks with Hart. Hart's trying to convince Rogers to collaborate on a satirical musical about Marco Polo. Rogers is played by Andrew Scott. Ethan Hawke as Hart speaks first.
I mean, Marco Polo's going to be a show about joy, but a hard-earned joy, an unsentimental joy. Something wrong with sentimental? What? It's too easy. Oklahoma's too easy? The guy actually getting the girl in the end is too easy? You've just eliminated every successful musical comedy ever written, Larry. It's too easy for me. Did you hear the audience tonight? Yes.
1,600 people didn't think it was too easy. You're telling me 1,600 people are wrong? I'm just saying.
You.
can do something so much more emotionally complicated. We don't have to pander to what's easy. Oscar and I are pandering? No, I didn't say that. Irving Berlin is pandering? I love Berlin. White Christmas is pandering? Well, I don't believe White Christmas. Well, maybe audiences have changed. Well, they still love to laugh.
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Chapter 3: How does Ethan Hawke relate to his character in The Lowdown?
They want to laugh, but not in that way. In what way? In your way. They want to laugh, but they also want to cry a little.
Chapter 4: What insights does Tim Robbins share about his 30 years in film?
They want to know. They want to feel.
Ethan Hawke, welcome to Fresh Air and congratulations on all the new work you've been doing. I've been really enjoying it. You said that making Blue Moon stretched you and the director Richard Linklater to like the boundaries of your abilities. What made it so hard for you and so different?
Well, first off, I guess the emotional complexity. I mean, there's the verbiage. Larry Hart is at this opening night party, and it's kind of like he feels if he ever stops talking, he's going to be shot and killed. And so he just cannot stop talking. So there was the amount of text I had to learn.
Yeah.
There's the complication. He's incredibly, what is it? It's called the correlation of opposites. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: Why does Tim Robbins believe theater can be more impactful than film?
He's two things simultaneously all the time. He is incredibly jealous, and he's incredibly happy and proud of his friend. He's gay and in love with a woman. He's the most diminutive, smallest person in the room, and he's the biggest personality in the room. The whole experience of making it... I felt I was being asked to play two things at the same time, which is, of course, why I want to do it.
It was wonderful and it was like the way real people are. But it's challenging. Every now and then you do, you bump up against a part that presses you to the wall of your ability. And you know you can never be as good as the part is demanding of you. And that's a kind of thrilling spot to be in.
So you're playing someone who thinks that their height, their hair, makes them really ugly and unappealing. Plus he's gay and he has to hide that from the public.
Well, it was illegal in 1943, so he does have to hide it.
No, absolutely. Right, right. So in a way, talking all the time is a distraction from all the things that he thinks are... uh unappealing about him and he's also very short i think he's like five feet or under you're you're pretty tall and you had to have a comb over for it which is literally not attractive so um you had to feel very much not like yourself
Well, it was interesting. I was being directed by a man who's directed me, and this is our ninth film collaboration. So he knows every trick in my toolbox. And he was really asking me to disappear. He just wanted me to be Larry Hart. And so... even the man has spent years of his life editing my performances. So anytime he would see me, he would say, I saw you, I saw you, I saw you.
And he was, I saw you, Ethan Hawke and not Larry Hart and not Larry. And so the physical things are kind of, you know, they're kind of easy. They're superficial ultimately, if they don't unlock the soul of the man. Right. Um, Anybody can shave their head and do a comb over. But it was really the soul of a person who was loathing themselves. And at the same time,
thinks they're smarter than everybody else. And his intellect is his only power. His pride in his work is his only self-worth. And that is being stripped from him on this night. I mean, imagine if you only worked with one other person for 25 years and you achieved incredible heights and this person now doesn't want to work with you anymore.
So it's truly heartbreaking for him because I think he's smart enough to know that the world is changing. We're in the middle of the war. The jazz age is being left behind. Something new is happening and he's not going to be a part of it. And he feels a titanic plate shifting, you know, and he's being sent away to Antarctica or something. I mean, that's what I think he feels.
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