ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Do you feel more in the zone creatively now than you did at the peak of your infamy as a Gen-X icon 10 years ago?
ETHAN HAWKE: Absolutely. We as a culture love to celebrate people in their early 20s. But it's not a comfortable place to be in your mid-20s. You don't know who you are as a person. You're screwing up left and right. It's very awkward. I've found that the older I get, the easier it is to be the person you want to be. Self-importance has a stranglehold on people in their early 20s. That's the razor's edge you need to walk: to take yourself seriously but not too seriously.
Speaking of taking yourself seriously: What was it like to revisit your novel, The Hottest State, as a director?
I felt like I was adapting somebody else's novel. To be honest, I needed some experience directing. I like young people and I'm interested in how hard it is being a young white male in the United States of America in our early 20s. Nobody empathizes with you. You're not very interesting. Men get more interesting as they get older, I guess. Hopefully. But it can be very difficult to find yourself and to struggle to have an authentic life and make the most of your life.
Did it make you feel vulnerable to revisit the novel after being so criticized for its self-absorption?
If you're me, there's a lot of advantages that come with it and a lot of disadvantages that come with it. People never hesitate to tell me when they think I'm an asshole.
So aren't you tempted to bury that part of yourself and hope people forget?
I can't. I buck at that. I was too young to be held accountable for how you felt about me when I was 23. I enjoy life too much to let myself be defined by that.
Are you happy with how it turned out?
It was a weird opportunity to get to make such a personal film in such a corporate age. To use cinema for self-expression in an age when everything is supposed to be a commodity for sale, I felt so privileged, and all of that was such a luxury. People who don't like my film don't like it passionately because they get this idea that self-reflective art is an act of egregious narcissism. And if that is true, what do we say to Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, to Proust to Whitman? You start to take a certain pride in their hatred of it. But the truth is, I'm really not only interested in self-reflective art. There's also a bunch of other stuff I'd rather do.
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