Ethan Hawke explains why his Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward Doc became a six-hour affair

Until quite late in the creative process of 'The Last Movie Stars' - a six-hour deep dive into the on-screen and off-screen lives of Hollywood golden couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, now airing on HBO Max - director Ethan Hawke resisted the idea that he was making a TV series.

"I don't like the episodes. I don't like the nature of fake cliffhangers. My brain is allergic to that," admits Hawke, who unveiled an hour of the project at the South by Southwest film festival in March. , then two more segments at the Cannes Film Festival in May. "When I started, I really wanted it to be short enough that you could watch it in one sitting. I wanted the lasso in the size of "No Direction Home" or something."

But the deeper he dug, the bigger he grew, extending beyond the couple's career successes — which include 14 Oscar nominations between them, a Best Actor Oscar, a Best Actress Oscar and four Emmys — to their philanthropy, political activism, and unusually private (for such a high-profile couple) personal lives. The final episode, which begins with the couple's death and lasts just over 90 minutes, is like a movie in itself.

"If I were to do a feature-length documentary about Paul and Joanne, this would be it," says Hawke. That said, “I didn't want to make the movie about their deaths. I wanted to talk about their life. That's why the final chapter bury them first, then backtrack through the most complex part of their lives. (Hawke likens the venture to Doris Goodwin Kearns' nearly 800-page FDR biography "No Ordinary Time.")

It all started with a phone call from the couple's youngest daughter, Clea Newman. Years earlier, "Rebel Without a Cause" screenwriter Stewart Stern conducted a series of interviews with virtually every key party for a biography of their father. But at some point Paul changed his mind and destroyed the tapes.

Thankfully a stack of transcripts survived, including heartfelt insights from so many key players in the couple's lives, former roommate Gore Vidal and director Elia Kazan (who auditioned Newman for the role of James Dean in "East of Eden" and chose him over Marlon Brando for "On the Waterfront") over Newman's first wife, Jacqueline Witte.

“I knew enough to know what a huge undertaking it would be. And I desperately wanted to say no, because I realized that if I said yes, it would take a few years away from my life,” says Hawke What he couldn't know, however, was that a different, totally unforeseen force would hijack everyone's lives, making the project an ideal distraction from the pandemic.

In any case, the more Hawke thought about it, the more impressed and intrigued he became with the couple, who met early in their careers and left an incredible legacy as activists, parents and movie stars of first class - two of the last surviving members of the generation formed by Lee Strasberg who propelled the theater into the modern age.

"We're talking about two white people in America who were born with a lot and made a lot of it. They gave back, creating meaningful substantial art for 50 years; they gave away hundreds of millions of dollars. They gave way more money than they had," says Hawke. "I was curious about how to maintain that level of excellence for 50 years. Like, how does a person do that?"< /p>

Because Hawke had been approached by the couple's children, he had their support in looking at all aspects of their parents' story, including the damage caused by the divorce and the impacts of Newman's alcoholism. “They understand journalistic integrity, and they understand art, in that you have to have a point of view. Whenever someone does something non-fiction, it's not the truth; it's the truth with a point of view,” says Hawke.

"They spent their lives listening to people hyperbolize their father and felt the world was diminishing the most amazing person in their lives, their mother. And if it were up to them, they'd have it all about their mother, but you can't tell Joanne's story without including Paul. Their lives were inextricably linked."

To bring the transcripts to life, Hawke came up with the idea of ​​enlisting other actors to do the interviews and other archival in-character segments: George Clooney agreed to play Paul, Laura Linney (who had played alongside Woodward early in his career) read Joanne's words, with over a dozen others playing close friends...