LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Ethan Hawke: Hottest State
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Continuing this week's theme of New York actors turned director, Ethan Hawke is back with his second feature film The Hottest State, an adaptation of his first novel which was published over ten years ago. One certainly might wonder how much of Hawke's novel and movie is autobiographical, as they watch the story of William, a young Texan played by Mark Webber who moves to New York to be an actor after his parents split up. There, he meets and falls for a pretty young singer/songwriter named Sara (Catalina Sandina Moreno), experiences his first true love and his first shattering heartbreak when she mysteriously breaks up with him. In an odd bit of turnabout, Hawke plays William's estranged father back in Texas.
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Ethan Hawke may be one of Hollywood's hottest stars, but as hot as he is, he has resisted the lure of the Hollywood blockbuster. With Training Day - in which he plays his first ever cop opposite a villainous Denzel Washington - that may well change. Following the film's North American premiere at the recent Toronto Film Festival, Paul Fischer caught up with a very affable Mr Hawke.
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Ethan Hawke directed Chelsea Walls and has written two novels, The Hottest State (in 1996) and Ash Wednesday (in 2002). In 2005, he received his first screenwriting Oscar nomination for co-writing the 2004 film, Before Sunset (a sequel to Before Sunrise).
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On March 26, 2006 Hawke's personal business office in New York City was destroyed by a fast-moving fire. He was in the middle of directing and starring in a movie version of his first novel, The Hottest State. The fire broke out in a newly renovated office on the second floor of the office building and the blaze quickly spread to the fifth floor. It destroyed Hawke's fourth-floor office and his post-production studio. Master tapes and negatives from Hawke's film were being stored off-site and were reportedly not destroyed by the fire. In the summer of 2006, he appeared in the Sidney Lumet-directed film Before the Devil Knows You're Dead with Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney, and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
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After starring as another sensitive student of life in Richard Linklater's romantic talkathon Before Sunrise (1995), Hawke went back to his sci-fi roots with Gattaca (1997), a near-future parable about the dangers of genetic engineering. Although the film was a relative disappointment, it did present Hawke with an introduction to co-star Uma Thurman, whom he married in 1998 and had a daughter with later that same year. Also in 1998, the actor starred opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in an adaptation of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations; despite mixed reviews, the film heightened Hawke's profile while further establishing him as one of the leading interpreters of sensitive-boy artistic angst. After a starring turn as one of the titular Newton Boys alongside Matthew McConaughey, Skeet Ulrich, and Vincent D'Onofrio in Richard Linklater's neglected 1998 Western, Hawke took on an entirely different role in 1999. Starring in Scott Hicks' Snow Falling on Cedars, he portrayed a journalist investigating the murder of a Japanese-American man in post-WWII Washington State. The same year, he appeared in Joe the King, the directorial debut of his friend and Midnight Clear co-star Frank Whaley.
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Hawke was born in Austin and grew up around Fort Worth, where his father took him camping and shooting at Eagle Mountain Lake. His grandfather Howard L. Green served in the Texas House of Representatives for ten years and was Tarrant County judge for another eight years. Environment Texas is a statewide citizens’ advocacy organization based in Austin and is working to get the Texas Legislature to create sustainable and substantial funding for the Texas parks system.
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