Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Richard Rodgers teamed with Lorenz Hart to write musicals that featured some of America’s best-loved songs, like “My Funny Valentine,” “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Blue Moon.”
When Hart’s drinking and mercurial behavior sabotaged the team, Rodgers moved on to a new partnership with Oscar Hammerstein II, writing the musicals “Oklahoma,” “Carousel,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” and “The Sound of Music.”
Richard Linklater’s funny but tragic new movie, “Blue Moon,” featuring a tour de force performance by Ethan Hawke as Hart, is set at the fulcrum point – opening night of “Oklahoma,” shortly before Rodgers would briefly try reuniting one last time with Hart. (This is Hart’s story, but the film also features Andrew Scott as Rodgers, plus Bobby Cannavale and Margaret Qualley.)
It’s a fitting project given the long history between the director and star: Linklater has made 21 films since 1995 and Hawke has appeared in eight of them, including the “Before Sunrise” trilogy, “Tape,” and “Boyhood.”
Linklater and Hawke may not finish each other’s sentences – they don’t interrupt much – but in a joint video interview, they do bounce ideas back and forth. And when I tell Hawke that my wife and I plan to finish watching his great new series, “The Lowdown,” that night, he responds by saying, “And then you’ll have to watch ‘Nouvelle Vague,’” a plug for Linklater’s other new film about the French New Wave filmmakers, which Hawke is not in.
Hawke said it’s easy to understand why “Blue Moon’s” subject matter interested them, but Linklater says, “I don’t think we ever drew a parallel between them and us. We didn’t discuss it.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. It’s 30 years since “Before Sunrise.” Did you realize then you’d find a collaborator for life?
Linklater: I remember someone asking, “Are you guys going to work together again?” We kind of looked at each other and I said, “I hope so.”
Hawke: If someone said we’d be working together 30 years later, I’d have said, “That makes sense. I’d sign up for that.” But you don’t know.
Linklater: We’ve both worked with people and had a great time, and then 30 years later, you realize you haven’t worked with them again for whatever reason – not that you don’t want to, it’s just that there’s a certain random thing going on too.
Q. What keeps bringing you back to each other in terms of the work?
Hawke: I’ve had a lot of good fortune in my life. One thing was meeting Peter Weir on “Dead Poets Society” when I was 18 years old – he was an experienced director and relished the position of mentor and teacher. So I thought that was what making movies was like, and had a rude wake-up call after that on other movies.
So to work with Rick and find somebody of my generation that had all the same gifts that Peter had, as far as team building, workshopping and methodology of his own cinema education, was amazing. “Before Sunrise” was my first experience where I felt back at the table I’d been at earlier. And I didn’t take it lightly. I had already learned that this was not easy to come by. There’s an intimacy to making serious work together that requires a lot of each other.
Linklater: Ethan is an all-in artist – curious and with a great work ethic. You need a guy who’s going to work really hard to achieve what you want. A good collaboration by definition is you can arrive at someplace you couldn’t have alone – you build off ideas and passions. And Ethan has an enthusiasm – he’s like a beatnik character who’s just mad to live and excited about stuff. I’m more quiet and feed off energy from others.
Hawke: And I need a discerning mind present at all times
Q. Do you guys have a shorthand or telepathy on the set at this point?
Hawke: People that work with us say that we do. But it happened slowly and effortlessly over time. When you collaborate, there is a psychic thing that happens, which you see in sports teams or in music. There’s many times I know what Rick thinks about something before he says it because we’ve sailed this water before.
Q. Was this project different from your past ones?
Linklater: Everything you do has different requirements, but this one was really different – Ethan had to really physically transform. Mostly when you’re rehearsing, you’re building and it’s additive, but with this we were physically [changing] him.
Hawke: I also had to lose my contemporary mannerisms and lose the way I speak while learning how Larry speaks,
Linklater: I was a naggy director. “That little gesture you just did is an Ethan gesture. I don’t want to see that.”
Hawke: He’s edited me for so long, so he knows every trick in my toolbox, and he wanted to get rid of them all. I’m grateful for it because I watched the movie, and I can really see Larry.
Q. Have either of you read Ian Leslie’s “John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs” about Lennon and McCartney’s friendship and collaboration?
Hawke: It’s amazing. A fantastic book. And it broke my heart. One thing I like about “Blue Moon” is that it explores male friendship, which is hard to do well. That book also understands that we do need each other and we do need friendships and we don’t have a lot of vocabulary for how these friendships work and why they’re lost. That’s why the Rodgers and Hart story is moving to me.
When McCartney is asked if he thinks about Lennon while he’s writing, he says, “All the time.” And he often thinks, “John would hate this.” Rick and I can have different ways of being, and I don’t need to stop being me, and he doesn’t need to stop being him, but that intersection creates something interesting. We trust in that –everything doesn’t have to be icing all the time; things can be hard and valuable.
Q. I recently interviewed The Who’s Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, who talked about how they’ve worked together all these years without really socializing or being close friends outside the studio and stage. Do you two stay in touch between projects?
Linklater: What is it about bands? I hear this with so many musicians, and it’s fascinating to me.
Hawke: Part of our work together is built out of our lives, out of being friends for 30 years – what are you reading, did you see that game, how are your kids, how’s life – all of that. And the joy of that friendship gets put into the work.
And I’ve never had a friend more supportive than Rick about my other endeavors.
It’s wonderful having a director that knows what I went through while doing “Macbeth,” who understands intimately the ways in which I’ve enjoyed and not enjoyed working with other directors. And I get to ask, “What was Cate Blanchett like? Tell me about her process.” Sharing as friends and learning like that is extremely valuable.
To be honest, work is easier to find than friends. And so I place a really high value on our friendship.