Following a banner year with back-to-back critically acclaimed performances in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, Sterlin Harjo’s The Lowdown and Scott Derrickson’s Black Phone 2, Ethan Hawke headed to the desert to receive a career achievement trophy during the Palm Springs Film Awards Saturday night.
The honor — presented during a starry ceremony inside the Palm Springs Convention Center attended by fellow honorees like Miley Cyrus, Adam Sandler, Timothee Chalamet, Kate Hudson, Michael B. Jordan, Amanda Seyfried and others — had Hawke feeling “incredible reflective” about his long and enviable career. Specifically, it had Hawke thinking about “the people who actually made this career that you’re honoring.”
“I am the consistent element, yes, but there are so many people sewn in to the fabric of it. I never did anything alone,” Hawke said.
As such, he spent the majority of his speech shouting out his many collaborators, beginning with the late River Phoenix with whom he starred in Joe Dante’s Explorers, a 1985 film about a young boy obsessed with 1950s sci-fi movies about aliens. After a recurring dream about a blueprint, he and two pals attempt to build themselves a spaceship.
“I remember being 13. I was staying at a Radisson Hotel up by San Francisco, watching out my window as a 14-year old River Phoenix walked back and forth across the parking lot,” Hawke recalled from the podium following a loving tribute from Oscar winner Mahershala Ali. “I went outside and I asked him, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘I’m practicing my character’s walk.’ He auditioned a series of walks for me, and it had never occurred to me to walk any other way but as cool as possible. That’s all I thought about.”
Hawke then opened up on the influence they had on one another during that time, which came in their earliest days in the acting business.
“I talked to him for a while. He’d never read a book. I gave him Catcher in the Rye. I had never listened to punk rock, and he gave me cassettes. I didn’t know what a vegetarian was. He showed me documentaries about slaughterhouses and the damage they were doing to our environment,” Hawke explained of Phoenix who died at age 23 of a drug overdose at the Viper Room in Los Angeles on Halloween night in 1993. “He will always be a part of me.”
Hawke then shouted out more of his many collaborators including Ali, Dante, Peter Weir, “the friends I made on Dead Poets Society,” Frank Marshall, Kathleen Kennedy, Laura Linney, the Steppenwolf Theater Company, Sam Shepard, Tom Stoppard, Sidney Lumet, Denzel Washington, his parents, his wife and producing partner Ryan Hawke, and more.
“All of us here are as good as our time,” Hawke continued. “We make each other. The interconnectivity between all of us is obvious and unimpeachable. The masculine and feminine are inextricable. If we hurt each other, we hurt ourselves, and that’s why we have to take care of ourselves because we are needed. We are needed to take care of each other.”
During a ceremony that saw many of the honorees promote the theatrical experience and the importance of sitting in a dark movie theater, Hawke stayed on theme. “I believe in the movies,” he said. “I believe that human creativity is nature manifest in us, and our expressions represent our collective mental health. And we, all of us in this room, have a charge to do our best, to do the good that we have the power to do.”
He continued: “We all know these are turbulent times, but they always are. Our challenges are unique to our time. Technology has made advances so quickly that it would first seemed like an advance suddenly feels like a retreat. Truth is hard to hear inside the tower of Babel but we know it when we see it, when we hear it. We are not as fragile as we fear. And there is so much fun to be had, and there is so much life to live. When I think about my career in the arts, in all honesty, I have had a ball. I have had so much fun, and there has been so much wildness. That’s what I aim to preserve — the wild. Protect the wild.”
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