From director Ethan Hawke, the six-part documentary The Last Movie Stars is a unique look at the romance, careers and partnership of iconic movie stars Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Enlisting the help of some of his own acting friends, including George Clooney, Laura Linney, Sam Rockwell, Billy Crudup, Zoe Kazan and Oscar Isaac, among others, to help tell their story by sharing personal moments and reading long-lost transcripts of interviews, Hawke gives a personal and intimate look into the couple and their lasting legacy.

During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, Hawke talked about his shock when one of Newman and Woodward’s kids reached out to him about directing this documentary, how grateful he is to his friends for participating, what led to him also including himself in the film, bonding with daughter Maya Hawke over the development of her own craft, having executive producer Martin Scorsese involved, and what he learned from this whole experience. He also talked about why he wanted to sign on to do Leave the World Behind with director Sam Esmail.

Collider: First of all, congratulations on the great success of The Black Phone. You never know how any film will be received or how it might do, so it feels like congratulations are definitely in order, when one has that kind of success.

ETHAN HAWKE: Yeah, I never know. It’s so funny, sometimes you make something that you think is really good and nobody cares at all about it, and sometimes you make something that’s really good and everybody cares. You just never know.

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Image via CNN Films/CNN+

At the beginning of this documentary, you said that one of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s kids approached you to direct a documentary about them. Did that feel like it came out of nowhere? Were you surprised by that? Did you have any idea that that was something they wanted you to do?

HAWKE: I was utterly in shock. I’m not even exactly sure why I answered the phone. I normally don’t answer the phone when I don’t know the number. Claire Newman had gotten my number from a friend, and she called me up and presented this idea to me, and I’m smart enough to know that would be like a bomb going off in my life. If I said yes, it was gonna completely hijack my home. I thought I would become obsessed with it, and I really didn’t want to. But I just couldn’t figure out a way to say no because I do admire Paul and Joanne so much. I remembered when I first arrived in New York, how much they lived as North Star of what this profession could be. More and more young people just think he’s the guy who makes salad dressing, and they don’t even know who she is, so I was like, “Maybe it’s time to remind everybody about these remarkable lives. Maybe we could use a couple heroes.”

What was it like to also include some of your friends in this, and to get them involved and assign them each someone to read the transcripts as? I thought that was such an interesting way to tackle a documentary.

HAWKE: You know, I’m so grateful to my friends. Nobody got paid. Everybody did it for the love of Paul and Joanne and the love of acting. I never intended to use the Zooms. I had to ask them all later. It’s a very hard subject matter to make sense out of, but they’re two really big lives. Their marriage spanned 50 years. I tried to focus it on their love affair, but even that focus is so large. It’s a shotgun. It’s a really wide blast, and I needed help. I started thinking about how you can’t tell the story of Paul and Joanne without telling the story of their generation. And likewise, it couldn’t just be me. It had to be our generation, reflecting. We’re all connected to each other, we’re all inspired by each other, and we’re all influenced by each other. Our work is determined by audiences. What do audiences want to see? What do they respond to? We’re all in this together. The storyteller tells stories that the family wants to hear or cares about it because if they don’t, they don’t get to be the storyteller anymore. I started thinking of it as a play with voices, without one narrator. I thought, “What if it’s a chorus of voices chiming around each other?” I thought that could be exciting, so I went for it.

In the doc, you refer to the acting classes they would be in with James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Marilyn Monroe, and in contrast, we see you, George Clooney, Sam Rockwell, Laura Linney, and all these other actors. I just thought it was such an interesting parallel between different generations of who we know as actors from their time.

HAWKE: Yeah. And one is photographed beautifully in gorgeous black and white glamorous shots while the rest of us are with our hair undone on Zoom in the middle of a pandemic.

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Image via CNN Films/CNN+

I also enjoy that we get glimpses into your thought process in making this and what it was like to put it all together. Did you go into this knowing you wanted to show that, as well? Was that something you decided along the way?

HAWKE: Yeah, I had no intention. I was adamant to not include myself. I was just adamant to try to be a good journalist and stand outside of it. And then, I started cutting things together, and I realized that young people don’t know who Gore Vidal is. Some people don’t know who George Ray Hill is. They don’t know who [Elia] Kazan is. At the same time, I didn’t wanna do a Wikipedia thing, where I’m teaching. The conversations we were having about them were a wonderful way to invite the audience into being a part of this dialogue and inadvertently explain certain details you’d need to know.

I love that you share a profession with your daughter, Maya Hawke, and that you include her in the conversations in this as well. What is the best conversation you’ve ever had with her about acting and about the craft? Did you ever sit down to talk to her about what it all means before she decided to do it herself?

HAWKE: I don’t know of a time that we didn’t talk about it. This is a young person that, as soon as she could hold a paint brush, she did, and as soon as she could hold a guitar, she did, and as soon as she read a poem, she memorized it and recited it. This is a born artist, so she was always watching. I was doing a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and we were doing a tech rehearsal, which is incredibly boring to watch because the lights are changing as you do it and nobody’s in costume. We went through the whole play once, and then we had a lunch break. I took her out to lunch, and I was gonna put her in a cab home. She was probably 12 years old, and she said, “Dad, can I watch it again?” She was just sitting in the audience by herself, watching Shakespeare with no lights or costumes, and was in love with it. I was like, “Oh, she’s done. If this is 12, wait until 18 comes, and wait until 25 comes,” because it only gets more interesting.

Martin Scorsese is an executive producer on this and you also get to have a bit of a conversation with him. Over the years, did you ever audition for him? Had you ever come close to working on something together, with him in the director’s chair?

HAWKE: I had a few meetings with him, over the years, once for a part that I didn’t get. Getting to get into his office and listen to him speak about directing, I felt a little bit like Eliot Ness getting Al Capone for tax evasion. It was like, “I’m finally in the room with Martin Scorsese. I’m not an actor, which is what I wanna be, but I’m here listening to him advising me about film.” I was so grateful for it. I felt like I snuck in the back door somehow. He’s definitely one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived. I love him so much.

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Image via CNN Films/CNN+

You talk about how movies really became your church and how seeing films deeply affected you. Did you know that, in those early moments? Did you know that you would be forever changed by films in that way, or was that something that took you time to realize?

HAWKE: A lot of children are deeply impacted by stories and movies, so you don’t know. I knew it was affecting me deeply. I knew it was my passion. I knew it was what I always wanted to do. A good day was the day I saw three movies. I just loved it. But you don’t know until later, if it’s really gonna be a lifelong love affair.

We’ve talked before about how you consider the most important aspect of your job to be who you choose to work with, so I’m curious what made you want to work with Sam Esmail on Leave the World Behind? He’s someone that I love the work of, and I love how challenging and thought-provoking his work is. What interested you in that project? Was it him? Was it the script? Was it the character?

HAWKE: I like the way he thinks and what interests him. I didn’t know him before I worked with him, so it was largely the script. And then, I started watching his work and I could see the movie. He has a very unique style and approach, so I could see the movie more clearly, and it seemed like a movie I’d wanna be in. It was also very easy to say yes to that movie because I really admire Mahershala [Ali] and Julia [Roberts]. They were attached before me, so it was an easy yes.

With everything that you learned about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, through the course of making this, was there anything that most surprised you or stood out to you or struck you about them? I was surprised to learn that they gave away more than $500 million, which was an aspect to them that I knew nothing about. Was there something you learned that you feel like you wouldn’t have known, if you hadn’t done this doc?

HAWKE: There was so many things, but their philanthropy is most interesting when you realize most people who give away that kind of money are billionaires. These people gave away more money than they kept. They gave away a lot more money than they ever made. It’s remarkable and incredibly uncommon. The thing I learned that was so wonderful was when you see these iconic couples, you just think of them as mom and dad ,or something like that, but they were lovers. It’s a love story. I started looking at it like I was trying to make a version of a Tolstoy novel. Inside their life, you see history, you see family, you see art, you see politics, you see their love affair encapsulated, and it was how passionate they were for each other and how romantic it was.

The Last Movie Stars is available to stream at HBO Max. Watch the trailer for the documentary down below: