An indie-film co-written and directed by four-time Academy Award nominee and Texas-native Ethan Hawke has several runtimes this weekend at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. “Wildcat” an independent film released in 2023, stars Ethan’s daughter Maya Hawke in the lead role as Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor as she ponders life as well as her writing circa 1950. Maya portrays O’Connor at age 24 as she comes to grips with a diagnosis of lupus, a disease that took her father when she was very young.
After her diagnosis, O’Connor visits her mother Regina (Laura Linney) in Georgia. Already given to an active imagination, O’Connor’s diagnosis gives her fuel to go deeper into her writing, often times blurring the lines between reality and imagination. In many facets, Ethan used several of O’Connor’s short stories to give her character different aspects in the film.
Other actors of note in this 108-minute semi biographical film include Philip Ettinger as Cal Lowell, Steve Zahn (Sahara), Vincent D’Onofrio (Full Metal Jacket), and Liam Neeson (Schindler’s List) as a priest. Even Levon Hawke, Ethan’s son and Maya’s brother, is in the film, making it an unofficial Hawke family project.
Released in September of 2023, “Wildcat” has only been viewed at a few film festivals and has enjoyed a limited run at select theaters in New York and Los Angeles. However, outside of these limited showings, “Wildcat” has only been screened in Fort Worth once, last Sunday at the Modern, which included a Q&A session with Ethan.
Ryan Bijan, filmmaker and host of Cowtown Movie Classics who was in attendance, says he was given the opportunity to ask the famous director a quick question.
“Since he was the co-writer of the film, I said, ‘when you and your partner sat down to write this film, how did you approach it? Did you go about adapting the short stories first and then writing the biographical story around that? Or did you just write it in chronological order?’ And the answer I got more or less was like, yes,” Bijan says. “They looked at the short stories and they mentioned how these were the themes they wanted to cover and how they applied to Flannery O'Connor's life.”
In the end, Bijan verified that Ethan and his co-writer Shelby Gaines, picked half a dozen of O’Connor’s short stories during a specific period in her life to portray her mindset in this film.
“And then from there, as they were adapting these short stories, they realized like, ‘oh, here, we need to have a scene where she's at the typewriter. Oh, this is a scene where she just gets into a fight with her mom,’ and so on and so forth. But yeah, the stories came first and then the structure of the film was built around it,” he says.
But this doesn’t mean the film is hard to follow. Bijan verified that viewers will catch on to the various scenarios being presented without feeling like the material is over their heads.
“Ethan did say he really doesn’t like bio pics, and I’m paraphrasing,” Bijan continued. “But this is more than a vanity project for him, this film was a real passion project for an actor who is very well read and has many years of experience in the industry.”
“Wildcat” showings:
- Friday June 07, 2024 4 p.m.
- Friday June 07, 2024 8 p.m.
- Saturday June 08, 2024 5 p.m.
- Sunday June 09, 2024 12 p.m.
- Sunday June 09, 2024 2 p.m.
- Sunday June 09, 2024 4 p.m.
Click here to purchase tickets online.
