Ethan Hawke recently joined Vanity Fair for a career retrospective video interview and remained in awe that he got the chance to watch Robin Williams act on the set of 1989’s “Dead Poets Society.” Hawke was 18 years old at the time and observed that directing Williams was “not an easy thing to do” for filmmaker Peter Weir.
“Robin is a comic genius. But dramatic acting was still new to Robin at that time,” Hawke said. “And watching that relationship like, in the room — I was four feet away while they’re talking about performance — and that was something you don’t un-see. Robin Williams didn’t do the script, and I didn’t know you could do that. If he had an idea, he just did it. He didn’t ask permission. And that was a new door that was opened to my brain, that you could play like that.”
“Peter liked it, as long as we still achieved the same goals that the script had,” Hawke continued, noting the two men “had a very different way of working, but they didn’t judge one another or resist one another.”
“They worked with each other. That’s exciting — that’s when you get at the stuff of what great collaboration can do,” Hawke explained. “You don’t have to be the same — you don’t have to hate somebody for being different than you are. And then the collective imagination can become very, very powerful, because the movie becomes bigger that one person’s point of view. it’s containing multiple perspectives.”
“Dead Poets Society” stars Williams as an English teacher at an elite boarding school in 1959 who inspires his unruly students through the teaching of poetry. The movie was a box office success with $235 million worldwide, making it the fifth-highest-grossing film of 1989, and it became an awards darling with Oscar nominations for best picture, actor for Williams and director.
Watch Hawke’s full Vanity Fair video interview below.
