“I think when normal actor-director conversations on this subject happen, they’re talking about movies they watched in prep,” filmmaker Ethan Hawke says when I sit down with him and his daughter Maya, star of their new collaboration Wildcat, for a discussion about films that the pair have experienced together over the past 25 years since Maya was born. “Our prep was Maya’s entire life. There’s kind of too many movies to talk about.”

With that caveat out of the way, an understanding that we simply would never be able to get to them all, the conversation begins in the smallest of places: A Bug’s Life. It’s a natural start, Ethan notes, because Pixar’s sophomore effort from 1998 (after their 1995 debut with Toy Story) was loosely inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 epic Seven Samurai, which was also the basis for John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven in 1960, later remade by Antoine Fuqua in 2016. Fuqua’s Magnificent Seven reunited him with Ethan Hawke (who received his first Oscar nomination co-starring with Denzel Washington in Training Day), and it was on that set where Maya brought her father Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal.

It all connects back to a love of art when it comes to the Hawkes, and that time on the set of Magnificent Seven would lay the groundwork for their collaboration on Wildcat. Ethan directs his daughter in a biopic of O’Connor’s life in the period of writing Wise Blood and coping with a lupus diagnosis, peppering the film with vignettes depicting various O’Connor short stories. But before we go there, let’s get back to A Bug’s Life.

“It’s not just true for family films,” Ethan responds. “So many movies feel like, ‘This has a female gaze’, ‘This has a male gaze’, ‘This is for a sixteen-year-old boy’, whereas a lot of the movies that I really grew up on—take a movie like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, one of these staggering works of genius—you can enjoy that movie at fifteen and you can enjoy that movie at 55 in very different ways. It’s not male or female or anything.”

From their early cinephile days, the Hawkes shout out specific theaters like New York’s Chelsea Cinemas and Film Forum, the latter of which Ethan praises for its 11am Sunday programming of kids movies. “Instead of taking the kids to church, they play classic films. You can go see Buster Keaton, and sometimes they have Charlie Chaplin with live piano, or we’d go and see The Iron Giant or [The] NeverEnding Story or The Goonies or National Velvet with Liz Taylor.” Thinking back on those formative moments, Ethan enthuses with a brimming smile: “I love sharing movies, and Maya’s the most fun person to go see a movie with because you never know what she’s gonna like and what she’s not gonna like. You never know what she’s gonna say about it afterwards, which actor she’s gonna be in love with, or somebody who gave a famous great performance that she thinks is terrible.”

“I remember one of the high points of my life was this movie that meant the world to me,” Ethan says. “It was Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, which probably came out when I was fourteen.” He then turns to his daughter: “It got rereleased when Maya was fourteen, and I remember taking you to the movies to see the director’s cut—actually one of the very few examples of the director’s cut being a far superior film—and I remember, Maya, you were so funny, we walked out and she’s like ‘Now I understand the way you dress.’” Maya leans her head down and apologizes, before sharing, “I forgot I said that, but it’s totally true. And now, since then, it’s become the way I dress.”

It becomes clear that there was a period of time when Ethan was specifically highlighting some of his favorite coming-of-age flicks to help Maya see herself in the world, as her perspective of it was changing around her. “I didn’t want to be the dad who recommended movies you don’t like,” Ethan explains, “which is usually what parents do. Like, ‘I really want you to watch Winter Light.’” The recently shuttered Alan’s Alley Video in New York gets a mention from Maya (“Please don’t get rid of all the video stores and movie theaters, please.”) as she remembers being a freshman in high school when she and a friend followed Ethan’s recommendation and went to Alan’s to pick up Léon: The Professional.

Speaking to Tatum’s portrayal, Maya appreciated “a juvenile performance where a young person is really working so hard to impersonate an adult, to show how much they could keep up with the adult world. I feel like I was really going through that at the time that you showed me those movies, with a deep longing for adulthood. And of course, as soon as you become an adult, you have this longing for childhood. It always helps to look at something from a third-person point of view.”

It All Leads Back to Altman

Wildcat’s unique structure might take some getting used to for certain viewers, an adjustment to its almost stream-of-consciousness melding of the vignetted short stories with the central focus on O’Connor. The film follows her coming to terms with her lupus diagnosis and returning home to be looked after by her mother Regina (Laura Linney). It’s a bold swing for the Hawkes to trust their audience with, and one can draw a connection between their ambition and that of one of their shared favorite filmmakers, Robert Altman. “I would say my favorite movie, Dad, that you showed me is Altman’s Nashville,” Maya shares. “It’s my favorite movie. I talk about it all the time. It’s an odd movie, a long movie, very poetic and quilted. It’s all these kinds of different, individual moments and not very plot-oriented.” Something that ties directly into their new picture together.

“One other thing I would say about Nashville that I think about all the time is the sound design,” Maya continues. “You hear multiple conversations at once in many scenes. As an actor, I’m so often on set and you do a take and it’s great and alive and people are talking over each other and it’s amazing. And then you get a note and someone goes, ‘Hey, just for sound, can we do a take where you don’t overlap at all?’ I always think to myself, ‘Well, in Nashville, they overlapped and I could understand every word. Like, what do you mean? You need me to finish my sentence before the other person starts talking? That’s not what humans do!’ We can barely get through a Zoom in different rooms without talking over each other. I love the way that Altman built that world. It gives me the power of indignance every time someone tells me not to let another actor cut me off, because he did it so beautifully in that one.”

Brimming from ear to ear through his daughter’s eloquent monologue about sound design, Ethan gushes, “You are truly my child.” He goes on, of Nashville, “If you ever want to see me lose my temper, put me with a sound man, because I go bananas and I end up talking about Altman all the time. Most sound men hate that movie, by the way, for precisely that reason. But I think it sounds amazing. The sound design was a huge part of Altman’s goal in making it, where each person was wired, even in the big crowd scenes.”

Picking up each other’s thoughts with a natural rhythm that lets you know they’ve spent many a night discussing their love of Altman, Maya jumps back in and says, “He took the radio mic to a new level. He would get everybody with a radio mic on and he would play with the levels later. That’s what was so wonderful for the actors. You didn’t know whether the camera was on you or not, which gives people so much freedom. When we were doing [The Last Movie Stars], [I learned that] Altman was asking [Paul] Newman to work that way. He had never worked like that, but he ended up loving it.”

Ethan calls Nashville one of his top five movies of all time, saying, “There’s something Altman does that almost nobody else can do—I think Richard Linklater can do it, only a few people can—which is to embrace some of the tools of the theater without ever becoming theatrical. To remain cinematic. The actors are inhabiting such real spaces, with long scenes where you’re allowed to observe body language and you don’t feel manipulated. You feel like you’re watching life in the way we talk about when going to the theater, what Stanislavski and Chekhov were trying to accomplish, where you’re just holding a mirror up to nature. There’s such a love of humanity, even when people are bad and ugly, there’s love for them. There are so many movies that are so cynical about bad people or people who don’t behave right. [Altman’s] just a scientist. You feel like he’s just a scientist dropped into Nashville, and he’s seeing it all.”

Thinking of Wildcat, he draws the comparison by noting, “We needed to be a bit of a scientist with Flannery where we’re not trying to discern for you whether she’s a good person or a bad person, whether she’s worthy of your time or not. She’s just worthy of this movie. That’s all we’ve determined.”

Brazen Biopics and Calling on Campion

The Hawkes’ cinematic portrayal of Flannery O’Connor began with Maya, whose longtime fascination with the author included using a monologue based on A Prayer Journal for her Juilliard audition. Acting as both star and executive producer on Wildcat, she felt that her father’s recent work in the Showtime miniseries The Good Lord Bird, as well as Blaze, a biopic he directed on musician Blaze Foley, showed a curiosity for themes relevant to O’Connor. “Put simply, I’m a nepo dad!” Ethan joked to Variety last year ahead of the film’s screenings at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals. Co-parenting Maya with former wife Uma Thurman, father and daughter acknowledge the advantages of having showbiz parents, while also asserting that you still need to have the goods. “Famous parents can help you get an audition, but they’re not going to get you in,” Ethan said to Variety when discussing Maya’s acceptance into the prestigious school.

One virtue of the nepotism conversation that isn’t often discussed is the ability to mix work with family, something Ethan explains with me when he notes, “We had such an interesting experience getting ready for Wildcat. Maya had her wisdom teeth pulled and came back to the house and stayed with us for a few days to recover from her giant sore mouth. She was heavily drugged up and the best captive audience. She was on the couch for three days and just wanted to watch anything. It didn’t matter how long it was; it didn’t matter how weird it was. We had so much fun. I knew I was getting ready to direct her, and I remember we watched Coal Miner’s Daughter with Sissy Spacek.” Maya jumps in to concur, “The best music biopic of all time,” while Ethan adds, “I always like to say that’s a very low bar. Most of the music biopics are pretty bad.”

She continues: “We had no interest in making a biopic when we were making Wildcat. We were interested in telling a story about imagination, faith, reality, America and femininity. We saw an opportunity in the facts of Flannery’s life to achieve that goal. In the biopics that I like the most, there’s clearly a personal thesis or reflection that the [team] are having on themselves and their world that goes beyond the facts of the story they’re trying to tell.” Ethan suggests in response: “You don’t watch Raging Bull and think Scorsese’s trying to teach you about Jake LaMotta. He’s expressing his inner fighter with Jake LaMotta’s life. It becomes powerful on multiple [levels].”

The pair feel the same can be said for Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table, which Ethan describes as “a north star” in making Wildcat because “it’s a biopic, but it’s not a biopic. It’s a movie about a person.” Maya goes back to an earlier point, noting that “you don’t need to know who [it’s about] to enjoy the film. I had no idea who Janet Frame was before we watched An Angel at My Table. Now I do, but really as a character in that story more than I know her as a writer. Which I think is cool to have a movie go and be that true to life, where it’s completely freed from its reputation as a biopic.”

“As a filmmaker, it’s such a fun movie to study because it’s one of those strange examples where the performances, the photography, the music, the writing and the production design are all one thing,” Ethan says, with his director hat on. “It’s impossible to separate them. The movie is working towards something bigger than the sum of its parts.”

Ethan recalls throwing on a double feature of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and Badlands during Maya’s wisdom teeth recovery, specifically pointing out their use of voice-over as a source of inspiration. “I knew we were about to make a movie that had a tremendous amount of voice-over, and that can really ruin a film,” he warns. “It can be a crutch, or it can make a film. Days of Heaven, [Linda Manz’s] voice and the writing is so beautiful. The voice-over in Badlands is amazing, too. I remember when I was doing First Reformed, Paul Schrader would talk a lot about the power of VO when it’s used right. The trick is that it can never be used as a cheat for furthering the plot. But if it’s used like music, it invites you into an internal experience and it can be really magical.”

“When I was younger, sometimes we would paint together, my dad and I, and we would just kind of free paint,” Maya responds. “We’d call them ‘masterpieces’ and sometimes they all turned completely brown. We’d try not to paint any actual objects. It wasn’t a house or a flower; it was just color on the page. They were not masterpieces, but that’s what we called them.” It’s undeniable that Wildcat is infused with what Maya calls the duo’s “inclination toward finding the beauty in free-form expression.”

The spirit father instilled in daughter at a young age while throwing paint on paper transfers through to their latest collaboration, as Maya explains, “We both realized that we had to find a way to make [Wildcat] and not try to make a masterpiece. Not try to discover it slowly from washing colors around, but try to work in [Flannery O’Connor’s] way,” which the star describes as “like a razor blade.”

“It’s a form-meets-content thing,” Ethan adds. “When I was making Blaze, about Blaze Foley, he was this big guy. He was messy. He was sloppy. He was inadvertent. It was very fun to try to match him in that. We shot the movie very simply. We used one lens; we let actors improvise. I kind of made the movie in the editing room. With [Wildcat], it was entirely opposite. We had to be so much more disciplined. I had to teach my brain to work differently because [O’Connor’s] not a sloppy person at all. If you’re really going to make a movie about her, you have to think like her.”

“The final edit looks a great deal like the script,” Maya echoes. “There were many, many drafts of the script, and I don’t really know if we have more than one deleted scene. I think that we really made the movie that we set out to make.”