.png){kind=logo}
Sunrises and sunsets are an important part of Richard Linklater’s filmography, forming the backdrop of two romantic films he made with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in 1995 and 2004 respectively. The same concept could be said to apply to the two films the director premiered in 2025. For Cannes, he delivered Nouvelle Vague, a playful account of the chaotic shoot behind À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), the film that raised the curtain on French maverick filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s tenure as the maverick king of cinema.
For Berlin, though, he came with something just as sparkling but altogether darker, a sketch portrait of a falling star. Featuring a bravura performance by Hawke, Blue Moon, Linklater’s ninth collaboration with the actor, presents an evening in the company of 5ft songwriter Lorenz Hart, seven months before his ultimately death aged just 48. Hart’s former composing partner, Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), has moved on to work with Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney), and Hart is attending the opening night of the duo’s first musical, Oklahoma!. Hart can see that it’s going to be a smash and leaves early, heading to the comfort of the bar at Broadway eaterie Sardi’s. There, the writer of songs such as “The Lady is a Tramp”, “My Funny Valentine” and, of course, “Blue Moon” holds court to an audience of two — the barman and the pianist — before meeting a young woman named Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), with whom he is obsessed.
Both films have since resurfaced in awards season, with the French-language Nouvelle Vague making the International shortlist at the Oscars and the Baftas, where it also vies for Costume Design. The Baftas also smiled on Blue Moon, adding Hawke, co-star Scott, and screenwriter Robert Kaplow to its shortlist, while Linklater’s film also competes at the Golden Globes this weekend for Best Film in the Comedy Or Musical category, where Hawke is up against the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Timothée Chalamet and George Clooney. Deadline sat down with Linklater and Hawke to discuss this good fortune…
DEADLINE: Rick, did you know these two films would come out the same year? Was that part of the plan? Because there is a kind of symmetry to this.
RICHARD LINKLATER: Oh, it was part of no plan, but they do have similarities. They both had really long gestation times. Ethan can attest to this. We were working on Blue Moon for, I think, 13 years, probably, if you add it up now, and the same with Nouvelle Vague. They both were projects that had been developing scripts. Thinking about it, I had this loose notion of an artistic trilogy involving another film I did, Me and Orson Welles (2008). But, yeah, it’s funny. We did shoot them back-to-back, but there was no plan. It’s to no one’s advantage; it just so happened these two films about artists at crucial moments in their lives came out at the same time.
ETHAN HAWKE: What I love about it is one of them is set at the very beginning of a career, with the first blush of falling in love with art and the power of art, and one at the very end — it’s like a howl into the night when one is beaten by their own irrelevance. They operate as brother and sister projects in my mind.
LINKLATER: [Laughs.] So, Ethan, you’re kind of saying we’re on the Larry Hart side of our lives. Long gone are our Breathless days!
DEADLINE: Ethan, you’ve obviously worked with Rick a lot. What did you think when he put this idea to you?
HAWKE: Well, things with Rick and I don’t happen in a business sense. I mean, it wasn’t like, “Oh, hey, I’m making this movie. I’m thinking about…”
LINKLATER: [To Hawke.] Yeah. It’s not a submission. It’s not a request for your availability.
HAWKE: We’ve been friends for a long time, and Rick had this amazing piece of writing from Robert Kaplow, who I had become friends with through Rick. And Rick sent me this document, saying, “Look what Robert wrote. What do you make out of this?” And I was just blown away by it. My first response was just that this had to be a movie. I mean, even in its early conception, just the simple idea of following Larry Hart on the opening night of Oklahoma! — with the quality of writer that Robert is, and his insight into that moment in time — felt like it could be revelatory. Just immediately, I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, am I going to play this part?” It was like, “Oh, we have to make this movie.” Then we did a reading. I read the part, and before I knew it, I was starting to invest myself in it. I never even asked Rick’s opinion if it was OK if I played the part. I think I just started doing it.
LINKLATER: We just started. We work kind of loosely together that way. It just sort of evolves, and we rally around the material. Robert wasn’t that sure. He was like, “Is this a movie?” We were kind of like, “No, this isn’t a movie — but it’s a movie we could make. We’re the only people who would ever think that this is a movie. It’s our kind of movie.”
DEADLINE: Rick, did you know much about Lorenz Hart before this?
LINKLATER: Yeah, I had a pretty good understanding. Not the depths of it, but yeah. I’m a musicals guy, and I was aware of the parameters of his life and the breakup [with Richard Rodgers]. So, a little bit. This [project] only deepened that. I love the music, but getting into the life was much more fun, of course.
DEADLINE: How much research did you do? Because it’s still available, that history. It’s a long time ago, but it’s still within reach, almost.
LINKLATER: There were a few books published, and there’s so much available. It’s a pretty well documented moment in time, A lot of history, a lot of pictures. From a personal standpoint, I just wanted to read every book. There was a lot for the art department. We could go to Sardi’s, for example. We had a lot of visual references.
HAWKE: Like the real copies of Playbill. There was so much fun to be had. Robert is a great scholar, so he was a great resource to us. And there’s an amazing biography of Lorenz Hart called Ship Without a Sail. That’s pretty comprehensive.
LINKLATER: Yeah, it’s pretty good.
HAWKE: And pretty impressive. And for me, there’s actually a handful of things you can find online. Weird little videos, weird little interviews. Some of them were really helpful.
LINKLATER: Yeah, historically, he’s perfect because he’s not completely lost to history. He’s an obscure character, at this point in time, but the closer you get to him, you realize he’s kind of everywhere. Larry’s been there your whole life. He hasn’t left us. So, that’s the kind of guy to bring back to people’s attention — someone who not only hasn’t left us, but will not leave us, just because of those songs.
HAWKE: Yeah. I thought I didn’t know who Larry Hart was until I started digging in and realizing that I knew 25 of his songs by heart and didn’t even know it.
DEADLINE: Ethan, what was your way into the character?
HAWKE: Well, first of all, this world has been a part of my life since I was a young man. I arrived in New York when I was 18, full of the dreams of what it could mean to be a professional actor. You’d walk into Sardi’s, see those pictures on the wall, and it felt like you were walking into the Hall of Fame. I’ve been at countless Broadway openings in my life. So, my approach, pretty early on in our dreaming of the movie… [Pauses.] I think it was probably Rick, but somebody said, “This whole movie really needs to be a Rodgers and Hart song.” What if we made a 90-minute Rodgers and Hart song? What if it could be full of the silliness, the poetry, the profundity, that strange energy that those songs have?
LINKLATER: All that yearning! Don’t forget, it’s all the yearning!
HAWKE: It doesn’t follow ordinary film structure. In many ways, the film consists of a prologue, and then it’s just one scene. It is like the song of Larry Hart, following this one night. It’s got a musical component to it. There’s something kind of Vincente Minnelli about it. So, I just tried to see my role as Larry Hart’s role, just like Rick’s job was the Richard Rodgers role, to provide the architecture, the skeleton, the musculature. I was just there to dance with the lyrics.
DEADLINE: Did you study the songs? There’s a great scene where Lorenz talks about the musicality of lyric writing.
HAWKE: I just inundated myself with it. I would learn the lines listening to it. I’d drive to work listening to it. I’d fall asleep listening to it. I’d change my clothes listening to it, and it was very hard for it not to permeate everything that we were working on, in the way that Robert conceived Larry. I have these long soliloquies that are extremely musical in nature. You know what I mean? The verbiage is full of great wordplay and wit, just like a Larry Hart song. We’d read that he was really, really brilliant at writing very quickly. He’s a wordsmith, he enjoys the play of language, and so that needed to be manifest in the way that we attacked the role.
LINKLATER: Oh, absolutely. We’d been feeling our way through this for years. On the surface, people would say, “[Ethan’s] this six-foot-tall guy — how’s he gonna play this part?” Well, actually, Ethan… I want to talk about his theater background, his quickness, and the musicality he’s talking about. I’ve seen Ethan perform. Ethan has written songs. There’s a musical component to Ethan. He plays instruments. He can sing and write a song, just enough to appreciate the greatness of one of the greats at a level that a lot of people wouldn’t understand. So, yeah, we approached it like that.
But still, Ethan, on a physical level, had to disappear. To me, that was… Is it a technical challenge? I mean, on top of the psychic challenge of taking on a character, the depths of that, there was also a physical challenge. Not just losing the height, but the mannerisms. In all the things we’ve done, [the parts have] often been an extension of Ethan, or we’re in the real world. This was something else we hadn’t done before, and it was really difficult. It was tough. I had to be kind of bitchy. I was like, “Ethan, no, don’t do that. Don’t do that thing. That’s Ethan, that’s not Larry. Larry would never do that; he’s not that confident. You’re too confident.” So, it was that sh*t. I had to see Ethan Hawke drain away and be replaced by this sad, yearning, open wound of a human, five-foot-tall human.
HAWKE: And that’s what I wanted to do, but just because you want to do it doesn’t mean you can. I often felt, and I think Rick felt this way sometimes too, that there’s a simplicity to this movie. And whenever you’re trying to work with this level of simplicity, there’s just no room for error. It has to be so precise. It’s actually extremely difficult to get this direct, this straightforward. Clean lines, sharp lines, sharp turns. Everything had to be precise, and that made it very challenging.
DEADLINE: I was amazed at how quickly I forgot about the height difference…
HAWKE: Well, good.
LINKLATER: [To Hawke] Early on, we decided that if the first thing people are talking about is how short you are, or your bald head, or any of that stuff, then we’ve failed. We really don’t want this to be about that. That’s a byproduct of being Larry. It’s not a big deal. It’s only a big deal if you think about it too much, like, “Oh, Ethan is actually about a foot taller than this person.” But who cares?
DEADLINE: For me, the special effect of the movie is Bobby Cannavale. He allows Ethan to spark…
LINKLATER: Oh, yeah.
HAWKE: Well, I’m just so glad to hear you say that. He’s the best. What I love about his acting is that it’s effortless. A lot of times — with a great score, maybe, or great directing — when people do something really, really well, you don’t notice it. And that’s the genius of Bobby. And Bobby was the first person we cast besides myself, because we knew that that position on the team was the anchor. He’s the anchor of the whole movie, and so I’m particularly grateful to him. Rick saw Bobby and I in a play together in 2003. Rick cast him in Fast Food Nation (2006). The three of us have been friends for a long time, and we knew that he would be an essential element.
LINKLATER: Yeah. We dreamed of him 10 years ago. We were like, “Wouldn’t it be great if we got to get Cannavale to play Eddie? But don’t mention it until it’s a reality.” We were just so lucky he was available and willing to do it. It’s not the flashy part, but it’s the glue that holds the team together, in a way. We were all rallying around this script and Ethan’s performance within it. But all the other parts around it… If those don’t work, then nothing works. So, Bobby’s a huge element of that. A huge element.
DEADLINE: He also helps to address Hart’s drink problem. I used to know a bartender at Sundance who said to me once, “I’m the only psychiatrist you will ever need.” I wonder how you felt about portraying that side of his character.
HAWKE: [Laughs.] Dr. Bacardi!
LINKLATER: I do love their relationship. We talked a lot about that in prep. It has been going on a while, and this relationship ends at the door, but it’s a true relationship, and he’s very aware of Larry’s situation. He’s very aware of his problem. I mean, Larry has made him more than aware, but he regulates it.
HAWKE: One of my favorite moments in the whole film is Bobby’s face as he watches me listen to the reviews being read out loud. And that’s what I think Rick’s talking about, about the player that plays the notes between the notes, like a drummer in a band or a catcher in baseball. It’s a very, very essential part. And, yeah, it’s a dangerous portrait, in that this is a person whose life was ravaged and destroyed by alcohol, but that that’s not what we’re talking about in the movie. It’s just there. Bartenders deal with that all the time, and on what level they’re helping people, and on what level they’re helping people hurt themselves, is a delicate walk.
DEADLINE: Well, another delicate walk is the real people who pop up in the movie, like the guy that wrote Stuart Little and the young Stephen Sondheim.
HAWKE: E.B. White. Yeah.
LINKLATER: Yeah. We have a lot of fun little cameos. Well, more than cameos. They’re parts. We have a lot of good coincidences, let’s say.
DEADLINE: But it’s not heavy-handed. You credit people with a bit of intelligence to find out for themselves who they are…
LINKLATER: It’s a flight of fancy that Robert particularly loves, and I love it too, because it’s about a community, at a time and a place. And you have to think, Oh, wow, yeah, E.B. White did visit Sardi’s. He and Hart were contemporaries — two great wordsmiths in different realms — but it’s an imagined meeting. We don’t know if they ever really met, but if they did, isn’t this fun? Sondheim [is an easy guess] for musical people who know Sondheim’s relation to Oscar Hammerstein II. But the other buried treasure is… I like the people who recognize George Hill, the college student. George Roy Hill, the great director [of The Sting and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid], was a Yale student at that very moment. We found him in a yearbook from that era, and we thought, Oh, what if he was there that night? The conceit for this is that Larry might be a little exasperating to sit next to, but he’s actually really generous with his creativity and his thoughts, and he’s a good friend, ultimately. So, we see him sprinkling inspiration and knowledge around. He’s helping everybody, in his own way. And when Sondheim says that Larry’s lyrics are “a little sloppy”, it’s funny to hear that coming out of a 12-year-old’s mouth. But Sondheim did say that. He didn’t say it at 12, maybe he said it a little bit later, but it’s a conversation going on that we created that was going on in a backwards sort of way.
DEADLINE: Ethan, tell me about the shooting. You seem so at home on that set.
HAWKE: Well, one of the things — if I can say it in front of him — that I really love about working with Rick is that we really take our time preparing, so that by the time you get in front of the lens, you’re really kind of dying to do it. We’d been talking and dreaming about it for so long, and we only had 15 days to shoot it. So, it’s like we had all these years of preparation, but then it’s almost like getting shot from a cannon. We knew that, hopefully, all our preparation, all our thinking, all our meditating about it was going to happen, was going to come out of us in those 15 days. But it was a lot of pressure. We couldn’t lose an afternoon by not being prepared or not knowing what to do.
I find that what I love about movies is the power of a collective imagination. Rick’s imagination is very, very powerful. What he sees, how he sees the period. I bring what I bring. But then there’s these set designers who are like, “Hey, here’s the real program from the theater that night. We made this cake — we got it from a photo.” And the piano player’s playing real music that would’ve been played, the music that was popular that month. Everybody is wearing the right clothes, and it’s like a collective dream that starts to happen, and when it happens right, everybody feeds the other. When it goes wrong, there’s lots of tears in the sail and the sail starts flapping, but with this situation, we were really well prepared. We had a hot minute to do it, and we took our shot.
LINKLATER: It’s pretty exhilarating when you’re just grateful for the opportunity. Every day we’d look at each other, like, “I can’t believe we’re finally getting to make this movie.” And then, “Holy sh*t, we’re making this movie.”
HAWKE: “And we’d better make it well!”
DEADLINE: You did a really great job of bringing back the Great American Songbook, because it’s kind of fallen from favor a little bit lately.
LINKLATER: We recorded over a hundred songs. You got every song from, let’s say, 1917 to 1943 to pick from. That’s exhilarating — just pick your favorite songs. So, there is a musical element to this movie, but anything that can bring those brilliant, beautiful songs back into public consciousness [is fine by me]. I mean, in my mind, they never really went away. They permeate a lot of our world still. Or maybe just my world.
HAWKE: I don’t know, but, Rick, one of the things that I love about it — in my imagination — is that I love thinking about young people who want to be songwriters, or musicians, seeing the movie and leaving thinking, “I want to listen to Rodgers and Hart.” Because, as a person who loves language, their use of language is a tool that’s there for artists all over the world. In our culture, right now, people are very quick to be glib, and short, and not lean on the power of language. [Rodgers and Hart’s work is] just so insightful, and it’s such a great teacher, and I hope young artists get turned on by these old songs and these wild rhymes and realize how much more powerful sexual innuendo is than speaking of sex. It’s not prudish. It’s actually liberating.
LINKLATER: Yeah, Larry’s sexuality had to be kind of coded. Like Cole Porter’s entire song book is about sex, but it’s the cleverness, the wit, the slightly subversive nature that means there’s a class to it. That’s really wonderful.
DEADLINE: Well, can we talk a little bit about the girl, Elizabeth? How real is that character?
LINKLATER: That was Robert’s inspiration for the whole thing. He went to an estate sale at a library or something and ended up with a stack of letters to Larry Hart, and he was like, What the hell? It’s a mystery… He kind of reverse-engineered the entire thing, based on this young woman’s letters. It was very one-sided, her letters to him.
HAWKE: But it’s obvious they have a very interesting intimacy for a guy who’s known to be gay, and it’s an insight into how complicated human relationships are. And it’s particularly insightful to imagine Larry, who’s going through this unbelievable pain of breaking up with his creative partner of 25 years — the person that he’s built his whole life and identity around — and choosing to obsess on a young woman. It kind of makes no sense at all and it makes all the sense in the world.
LINKLATER: It’s something he’s so not going to get on any level. But to be kind of in love with the idea of love and projecting it? I love it. Because [the movie] is just so [much about] the impossibility of love, which is what she’s going through too. You see the whole cyclical nature of heartbreak, and it’s like, Oh my God, that’s perfect! We met with Margaret a couple years ago. She was the first one we went to and started talking to her about it, and she so got it. She so got it, and she was a total trooper. We had such a great time working with her. She had all the mystery and beauty you could hope for in that part.
DEADLINE: There’s something similar going on in the title as well. Is it true that Hart was not so keen on “Blue Moon” and had a love-hate relationship with it?
LINKLATER: Yeah, he did kind of rag on that title. It was a mercenary thing. I mean, Larry was a professional, right? I think he would’ve had a better feeling for his Broadway work, but that was a Hollywood concoction. You can go on YouTube and look up Manhattan Melodrama [1934]. Pretty good movie. There’s an early version of the melody, called “The Bad In Every Man”. So, I think it was just a day at the office for Larry, and it became that hit that can kind of hang around your ankle the rest of your life. At the end, after kind of ragging on the song and the popularity of it, we see a little personal reconciliation with it, where he’s like, “Better than f*cking ‘Surrey with The Fringe on Top’.”
DEADLINE: Is that something you can identify with?
LINKLATER: Ethan can probably speak to this. Almost every actor I know who’s kind of well known, there’s one film, one work, that towers. It’s the one the man on the street, the person who comes up to you in the airport, the one that everyone knows, like Sir Alec Guinness and Star Wars. I’m in a different category, as a behind-the-camera person, but I do get that some films are more popular than others. [Laughs.] Ethan probably gets, “Yo, man, love you in Training Day!”
HAWKE: Well, it’s funny because I agree with everything you just said. I’ve never been in Star Wars. I never had anything that was so Obi-Wan Kenobi-esque. But I do know there have been periods of my life where I was worried about that. I was worried that the label of Gen X around Reality Bites and stuff was going to limit me. I felt like, “Look, that’s just one part of me, it’s not who I am.” But enough time goes by that I start to find that charming, and it doesn’t bother me anymore. I feel like “Blue Moon” for Larry is a little bit more [complicated]. Merle Haggard had this with his song “Okie From Muskogee”. He wrote it in two and a half minutes. It just kind of came out of him as a joke, and for the rest of his life it followed him around and defined him politically. I’ve never had that.
DEADLINE: So, you’ve made nine films together, I believe. Is there going to be a 10th?
HAWKE: Definitely.
LINKLATER: Sure. Hope so. Yeah. We’ve got this thing we’ve been developing. Ethan and I, we hadn’t worked together in 10 years. We’re friends, but we hadn’t rolled cameras since the end of Boyhood. I’m just glad we were doing it on something that was pretty rigorous and like, “OK, we better have both gotten a little better at what we do, and we’re really pushing ourselves. We’re not looking to just have a vacation together.”
HAWKE: It’s funny. If you’d asked me at the wrap of Boyhood if I thought it would be 10 years before we worked together again, I would’ve said no way. You don’t know. We hope to work together again this year, but in our profession, it’s very dangerous to talk too much about the future, because it hangs in the balance.
LINKLATER: Yeah. But I remember the first time we worked together, we were at a press conference for Before Sunrise (1995), and someone asked, “Will you work together again?” We just looked up and said, “Oh, I hope so.” You don’t know how it’s going to roll out.
DEADLINE: What’s next for you both?
HAWKE: I did a kind of action genre movie, The Weight, that’s going to premiere at Sundance in a couple of weeks, which I can’t wait for. I was a big fan of that William Friedkin film Sorcerer, and I’ve long had a dream of trying to make a good, cool action film. It’s with Russell Crowe, and the director, Padraic McKinley, I worked with on [Showtime series] The Good Lord Bird. I’ve been a fan of his since then.
DEADLINE: Rick?
LINKLATER: I don’t have full financing for anything. I’m hoping to be in production this year, put it like that, but nothing, no start dates.
HAWKE: And I’m hoping to be in it.
LINKLATER: I might throw Ethan a bone. Let him play a little part.
DEADLINE: Rick, is there a secret to being so prolific?
LINKLATER: No, the fact, is I did not shoot a film in 2025. The two that came out in ’25, I shot the year before. So no, I’m antsy, man. I’m ready to be in production.
DEADLINE: Rick, your other film this year, Nouvelle Vague, was really well received in Cannes. Were you nervous about tackling such a French subject on its home turf?
LINKLATER: I was, many years ago. Even when I was making it, I said, “OK, I’m making this for the world, but not France. We’ll never show it in France. They’ll hate it. They’ll hate that an American did this.” And then the closer I got to it… Everybody who worked on it, they loved it so much. I realized, “Oh, I’m really French.” [Laughs.] So, when I went into Cannes, I wasn’t really nervous, because I’d already seen it with various French people and audiences. I kind of felt like, what’s not to like? I mean, it’s a fun movie about film. If you make a cake for people, you don’t expect them to be angry. That’s how I felt about this film. It’s a dessert for the whole cinephile world.
English (US) ·