Ethan Hawke On His Flannery O’Connor Biopic ‘Wildcat’: “I Don’t Know Who Cares About Literature Anymore … But I Know I Do”
04.05.2024 - 17:27
/ deadline.com
Wildcat, directed and co-written by Ethan Hawke and starring Maya Hawke (Stranger Things, Little Women) as Flannery O’Connor, opens this weekend in New York and LA. One of nation’s most evocative, brilliant and ambitious writers, O’Connor was diagnosed with Lupus at 24 and reluctantly settled in with her mother, played by Laura Linney, at a dairy farm in Georgia, continuing to write until she died in 1964 at age 39. Raised in the Jim Crow south, where her work is set, she chronicled cruelty and hypocrisy in luminous prose.
The film premiered at Telluride and debuts theatrically this weekend in New York and LA via Oscilloscope. Four-time Oscar nominee Hawke spoke with Deadline on Wildcat‘s backstory, how it weaves between the author’s life and her fiction, and the current challenged state of indie film – “It’s never been easier to make an independent film. It’s never been more difficult to get anyone to watch it.” (The Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity.)
DEADLINE: Flannery O’Connor’s an incredible writer, maybe underappreciated. Her story ‘Good Country People’ blew me away years ago when I first read it. How did you come to her and to this movie?
ETHAN HAWKE: It’s really kind of a cross-generational movement. My mom sold college textbooks in Atlanta, Georgia, when I was a kid and she fell in love with Flannery O’Connor’s writing when we were down there. So I grew up in a household where I thought she was wildly famous, my mom just talked about her so much that I thought everyone read Flannery O’Connor. Maya discovered her on her own through a great high school English teacher. It gave us something to talk about together, we just both loved it. And then as Stranger Things started to blow up, and Maya started
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