Toronto -- The last time Ethan Hawke showed up at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1997, he was in love.
During the making of the science fiction festival entry Gattaca, Hawke fell hard for co-star Uma Thurman. Lucky for Hawke, she reciprocated.
In 1999, Hawke showed up to the festival again, this time to promote his new movie Snow Falling on Cedars. And this time, he's in love with another girl: his new daughter Maya Ray, who was born two months after Hawke wed Thurman in May, 1998. (It was Hawke's first marriage and Thurman's second; she was briefly married to Gary Oldman.)
The event, he says, had affected the task of starring in the drama Snow Falling on Cedars ... but in the best possible way.
Like any young father-to-be, Hawke found himself on emotional overload while making the film in Vancouver and Greenwood, B.C.
As he describes it: "I was like an open wound."
"It was actually a great time to be making a movie because I was so available," he smiles. "I could cry at the drop of a hat and I was so nervous.
"It was a great time," he says. "It's been the most humbling and most rewarding year of my life."
Hawke was himself born in Austin, Texas, in 1970 to teenage parents. His own father left when Ethan was a toddler.
"My parents didn't have enough love for each other to keep them together," he says.
That, Hawke says, made the responsibility of parenting an important challenge.
"I've never really had to do anything for anybody else before," he says. "I was the single child of a single mom, and a baby really asks you to show up and practise what you preach. Daily!
"I started out thinking: I'm going to win Dad of the Month, and then I realized there is no Dad of the Month prize, and it's every day. That's the thing: you've got to be there every day.
"Whether or not it's manifested itself in my behaviour, I don't know, but it's been the most maturing thing I've done."
But don't look for Hawke to chuck his penchant for making small intimate films in favour of big Hollywood blockbusters with huge paycheques.
Hawke started out making those films when he was just 14 and appeared in the Joe Dante adventure Explorers in 1985. His follow-up four years later was a breakthrough performance in Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society opposite Robin Williams.
But the 29-year-old actor says he'll continue with his habit of making smaller pictures, such as his upcoming $1-million modern-dress version of Hamlet, which he also produced. Hawke joyfully disparages A-list movie stars who "get indie" by dipping their toes in low-budget art films while still demanding huge trailers.
"Getting indie is like when you pay for your own phone bills," Hawke says.
So, why is he in a big-studio film such as Snow Falling on Cedars? Hawke says it's "basically a big art film made in a studio."
A reporter points out that it was based on a best-seller, but Hawke counters that that isn't necessarily a bad thing.
"It's a big popular literary novel," he says.
"It's not a movie that is even easy to say what it's about," he says. "It's not just about one thing, it's about a trial, but there's a love affair, and there's the history of a town."
Hawke acknowledges the combination of a studio and an art film is a sticky proposition. He says he learned after Columbia Pictures attempted to market the challenging cerebral thriller Gattaca.
"They didn't know what to do with it," Hawke says. "I always felt that if (indie studios) Fine Line or New Line or Miramax had Gattaca, they would have had a much better luck with it, as opposed to positioning it as some kind of sci-fi thriller."
Presumably, when it comes to the success of Snow Falling on Cedars, Hawke will be keeping his fingers crossed.
When he isn't changing diapers, that is.
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