This former Austinite, an Oscar nominee for his sinister role in Winter’s Bone, talks about Yoga, his music, his starring role in The Surrogate, and how he learned his craft while hitchhiking.
Maranda Pleasant: As a human being, what is the absolute core that you work from? What is that thing in your life that makes you want to get up in the morning?
John Hawkes: I think what gets me up in the morning is wanting to make things, wanting to create things. It’s really as simple as that. If I wasn’t a person who could make things on my own and collaborate with others to make things, to create—for lack of a better term—art…
That’s really the main thing that drives me as a person. General, I know, but it’s true.
MP: As any artist knows, to really be effective, you have to be
vulnerable. Our mantra around here is, “To be vulnerable is the…”
JH: “…is the new strong,” yeah!
MP: {laughter}
JH: I saw that one coming. {laughter}
MP: How do you balance keeping an open heart with maintaining a thick skin to criticism?
JH: That’s a fine line, a tightrope walk, of sorts. If you’re talking
specifically about criticism, it may be best for creative people to avoid that. For most creative people, they want to connect with
others. I think there’s also another form of creation that doesn’t
really care what people think of it, and that’s really strong and
amazing. But if you’re doing a performing art, or if you’re painting on canvas, and you really want people to connect with you or the piece, and they don’t, that does put you in vulnerable place. I also think that you have to take a great deal of joy in the doing of the work because that’s all you can have any control over, really, is your own perception and response to either your solo piece or the people you’re working with. You have to try and make those situations make you feel alive, regardless of how they’re perceived by others.
MP: Wow. That was really beautiful. I’m taking it to heart.
Sometimes we get so concerned with the output that we have no more joy. I wrote down “great joy in the doing of the work” and “failing better next time”.
JH: There’s a lot of acceptance that comes with the territory, too, because things are a certain way. Part of being an artist is accepting when things don’t necessarily go your way, and realizing that that’s fine too. You know, one thing I would say about the more popular art, the arts that make money, so to speak—music, film, television— I so often see, particularly in larger, more moneyed projects, a guess at what the audience will like. Like in a studio movie, they write the script kind of guessing what the audience will like or respond to. I feel like the only art that changes the world is when a group of people or a single person has an idea or a story or a vision that they want to create, regardless of whether the audience would like it. I think the best filmmakers make the movie they want to see, instead of guessing what the audience might want to see. It doesn’t always connect immediately, and sometimes it may be some things that we don’t get as a people until years down the line, but it’s the only art that changes the world, I think.
MP: I’m so happy to hear you say that. I just wish the system was built differently. We should strive to make quality films and quality music, without thinking, “Is this going to sell to the masses? How can we market it?” I wish marketing and art could stay separate somehow.
JH: It’s difficult, you know, and artists do have to eat. I’ve heard the creative life described—maybe rather cynically, but I think there’s truth in it—as part angel, part prostitute. You know there are times when you do need to eat and pay the rent, but you want to hopefully minimize that portion of your life and have most of it, as much as it can be, about being an angel and flying with your work. Feeling a personal connection to your work and feeling like your work has worth. For me, I try to have the angel outweigh the prostitute. I try to find a way.
MP: {laughter} That’s quotable!
JH: {laughter}
MP: My friend Seane Corn says she can go as dark as she can light. You personally emit all this light, but the characters you play have a lot of darkness. Do you think that that’s the case with you, that you personally radiate all this goodness, but on the other side of that you can go as dark as you can light?
JH: I think that’s an amazing statement by Ms. Corn. That’s
something I hadn’t really thought of, but in a strange way it makes a lot of sense. You have either felt or seen or participated in a great deal of darkness, sometimes, in order to find light. I think there’s truth in that.
MP: Where is it that you go to be able to play these really dark roles?
Is there something personal that you do to be able to have that kind of depth with your role?
JH: Well, yeah, I think every human being on the planet has experienced a great deal of pain and loss and sorrow, and it’s my job to be able to reproduce those things when needed—anger and rage and those kinds of things. It’s really liberating to pretend those things. It’s almost like an exorcism sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the kind of actor who’s psychotic and loses track of the fact that they’re participating in a collaborative piece of art or something. Certainly to be able to bring those kinds of emotions and, hopefully, pretend intensely and effectively enough to be believable in those kinds of emotions—that value for our stories, for telling stories.
MP: How do you transform your own personal pain?
JH: Wow, that’s heavy. I don’t know if I’m always effective at doing that. I don’t think I have a tried-and-true method of going through the things that you described. I think that, certainly, to have people in your life that you love and can talk to helps a great deal. I think I deal with things like many men do: in quiet solitude. It always comes back to creativity for me, on some level—to take what has hurt you and somehow make it of use. Even if it’s years down the line, I feel like all the experiences that we have, if we can remember our good and right experiences, as disappointing as they can be. I’m kind of dancing around a lot here, but I think the idea for me is to—even subconsciously—incorporate it into the work I do. I think that’s still a process that I’m figuring out. It’s a life’s work to be able to deal with disappointment and pain and sadness.
MP: When that comes in, and you dance with it, do you think that you channel it into your work?
JH: I think so. I think I was clumsily trying to say just that thing. Again it’s not always even a conscious thing, but when you’re a creative person, anything that happens to you is of use on some level. That’s the best way I can look at it. It’s also about accepting what comes your way as what’s meant to be—that kind of idea. I don’t know how I could live if I didn’t. It’s a trite idea, and it’s not original by any means, and it’s what people have been talking about through the ages. Figuring out a way to accept what happens as being what you need at the moment in order to grow—that’s a great, mature, adult idea that I’m still trying to completely embrace.
MP: I really like your energy, and when I talk to you and look at your work, there seems to be a lot of layers, a lot of texture. You have grit. It’s not this super polished one-dimensional person. When I watch snippets of you I think, “Wow, this guy has some life behind him!” You know what I mean? Maybe I’m off but…
JH: No you’re not off at all. You know, I have no training as an actor. No formal training in any of the arts, and I’ve always loved untrained and do-it-yourself artists, and that kind of work. There’s a lot of wonderful artists out there in all the mediums who are trained, but I always felt like it wasn’t a detriment, but a strength that I was slipping in an original approach to work, rather than one that had been pounded into me at a school somewhere. I think I’ve lived a great deal, and I’m able to bring that to work. I feel like some of the best acting lessons I ever had were hitchhiking. Just because you have to kind of play a role. You know you might have a ride with someone whose world view offends you terribly, but it might also be raining really hard and about to snow, and it’s getting dark, and you need to get to the next place to find a place to eat and to sleep. So rather than arguing with that person and getting kicked out of their car, I often had to play a character. It was interesting. You learn a lot about people when you’re in a car with them alone for many hours. That was valuable training for sure. I hitch-hiked thousands of miles in the early eighties—state to state and all around. Sometimes with a buddy from Austin, and sometimes all alone, but either way it was educational for sure.
MP: Love that. I don’t think people realize how much they can teach by sharing authentically, by being really real, so I think this is brilliant. What do you have coming up that you’re most excited about in 2012?
JH: Yeah, well, until you see something, you never know if it’s amazing or not, but you know you can certainly have hope. There’s a film that’s in Sundance this year. I’m looking at the third year in a row of having a movie that’s in the dramatic competition category. Two years ago it was Winter’s Bone. Last year was Martha Marcy May Marlene, and this year is a movie called The Surrogate, which is a very different role than I’ve played in the last couple films at Sundance. It’s a true story about a guy named Mark O’Brien who got polio when he was six years old and spent all of his life in an iron lung. He went to UC Berkeley and got a degree in Journalism, and then was a poet and journalist. The story picks up with him doing an article about disabled sex and becoming interested. He meets with a sex therapist and she recommends a surrogate, a sex surrogate. Mark was a deeply Catholic guy and so he was very “Is this a prostitution thing, what’s going on exactly?” There’s a wonderful role of his priest, played by Bill Macy, a wonderful actor, and Helen Hunt plays the surrogate. It’s a bit of a love story. I’m playing a character who can move his head only ninety degrees, that’s all the movement that I have.
MP: Was it an emotional process for you?
JH: Physical and emotional. The character is in a lot of emotional pain due to his disability, and it’s a tricky thing as an actor playing a disabled person, because the first thing I said when I met the director—who also is disabled, stricken with polio when he was young—was, “What about a disabled actor to play this role?” And he said, “I’ve searched. I’ve searched for two years.” He’d seen people, and he’d tried to get people to audition, and he couldn’t even find that many people.
I was nervous about, kind of, taking work away from someone who might be uniquely suited to it, but hopefully I’ve done a good job. Hopefully it’s a great piece.
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