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 Ethan Hawke is being touted as an early Oscar contender for his role as a loser younger brother in Sidney Lumet's melodrama, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. (STAN BEHAL/SUN MEDIA) |
Ethan Hawke wasn't intimidated on the set of the heist-gone-wrong melodrama Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, despite the presence of top-shelf, even legendary, talent.
Veteran British actor and five-time Oscar nominee Albert Finney co-starred as Hawke's domineering father. Revered director Sidney Lumet called the shots. And co-star Phillip Seymour Hoffman had just won the Oscar for Capote when he turned up to play Hawke's brother.
"One of the great things about Albert Finney is that he has a very deep and sincere humility about him," Hawke, 37, said in September at the Toronto International Film Festival.
"You could go out to dinner with Albert Finney and have no idea that he was a famous film actor, the way he carries himself. A lot of older actors or older men who are successful are constantly telling self-important stories about the funny moment they did that, or the amazing person they met then. And Albert Finney is very low-key."
It helped, too, that Hawke -- previously Oscar-nominated himself for both acting (2001's Training Day) and screenwriting (2004's Before Sunset) -- had worked with Finney in 1993's Rich in Love. Hawke felt similarly comfortable with Lumet and appreciated the fact that Hoffman chose Devil as his first post-Oscar win project, even though Lumet -- the director of such long-ago classics as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Network -- had seen some lean years in the '80s and '90s.
"Phil Hoffman had just won the Academy Award and he wanted to work with Sidney Lumet, and I thought that spoke incredibly highly of Sidney and of Phil -- that he used that moment to help greenlight a movie for Sidney," Hawke said. "Every movie that doesn't have models taking off their clothes, that aspires to be about more than entertaining you, is very difficult to get made."
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Now Lumet is enjoying a major comeback with Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and both Hawke and Hoffman, who'd known each other "peripherally" from the New York theatre scene, are being touted as early Oscar contenders.
Hawke said it was the melodrama that first attracted him to the role of Hank, the loser younger brother of Hoffman's seemingly more successful sibling Andy, who proposes they knock over their parent's jewelry store.
"Melodrama is deeply challenging to the actor, and melodramas can be terrible, or melodramas can be the best films you've ever seen," Hawke said. "And the fun thing about the script is it's impossible to stop reading, and I thought it could make a very good film. It's Greek. It's so Shakespearean. I mean, it's playing on such classic archetypes, the brothers. The whole family relationships. (What's) kind of thrilling about it is you feel it play inside these old archetypes. And I'd never played a character like this."
Interesting, too, was the casting choices. Hoffman and Hawke perhaps more easily could have played each other's roles.
"If you think about it, five years ago, Hank is the quintessential Phil Hoffman part -- and I think it made the movie a little bit more interesting to watch to have us play the opposite."
Hawke currently is directing the new play Things We Want in New York, and he has two other movies in the can: Playing a bloodsucker in the vampire movie Daybreakers, and a septic-tank cleaner in Staten Island, written and directed by his Assault on Precinct 13 screenwriter James DeMonaco.
Hawke describes Staten Island as "a contemporary Fellini film. It's just an insane, weird movie that I'm very excited about."
Starkers Marisa Tomei felt 'safe'
Actress Marisa Tomei, who appears "starkers" in bed with co-star Phillip Seymour Hoffman at the very beginning of the critically acclaimed Sidney Lumet film Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, had a protective guiding hand on set.
"The great thing about Sidney was he's so protective and nurturing, and he has such a clear vision and he loves actors. He's not scared of actors," Tomei, 42, said in September during the Toronto film festival.
"A lot of times directors are scared of actors -- they like the technical but maybe not the emotional -- and he just loves being with actors. So you already feel welcome and in a very safe environment."
The other thing is that the Brooklyn-born actress, who won an Oscar for 1992's My Cousin Vinny and was nominated again for 2001's In The Bedroom, is clearly a pro.
Believe it or not she was also shooting the slapstick comedy Wild Hogs at the same time as Devil, a grim heist-gone-wrong melodrama.
"That was actually really difficult," said Tomei, who has since shot War Inc. with John Cusack. "It wasn't that they were so opposite. It was the travelling back and forth, and then kind of jumping back in. That was a really big challenge."
Tomei is currently starring in the off-Broadway production of Oh, The Humanity and Other Good Intentions, which will have its premiere next Thursday night in New York.