With ‘Wildcat,’ Ethan Hawke Faces Flannery O’Connor’s Legacy Head-On

In the summer of 2020, Loyola University in Maryland removed Flannery O’Connor’s name from a dormitory. The school defended its decision in an official statement, explaining that it had recently come to light that O’Connor’s writing “reflected a racist perspective,” and their building names should “declare to our students what sort of values we esteem.” This came a month after The New Yorker published a story titled “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?”

Wildcat, a new film directed and co-written by Ethan Hawke, explores the life and mind of that once acclaimed, now embattled author who, in all of 39 years, imprinted her legacy on the literary world through writings that explored morality, sin, and salvation. (Born in Georgia in 1925, she also died in Georgia, from lupus, in 1964.) With Hawke’s daughter, Maya, starring as O’Connor, the story is told in pieces, jumping between depictions of her real life and reenactments of some of her most recognized short stories, including “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and “Good Country People.”

In quoting O’Connor’s work, Wildcat doesn’t shy away from some of her more unsavory inclinations, including using racial slurs. Hawke thought about this a lot as he worked on the film. Early in the process, he came across the New Yorker story and paused to consider what making the film might mean. Would he be glorifying a racist? What should it say about O’Connor’s legacy?

Following a period of soul-searching, conversations with his daughter, and a lot of reading, Hawke returned to O’Connor’s story determined to dive into its complexities. He sees her writings as critical to the American story, ugliness and all.

Ahead of the film’s theatrical release, Vogue spoke with Hawke about Wildcat’s structure, O’Connor’s life, and the place for faith—and O’Connor’s stories—in our agnostic-leaning culture.

Vogue: Would you call this project a biopic?

Ethan Hawke: It’s funny, I can’t stand that genre. It’s hysterical to me that I’ve actually made a few of them, but I resist the genre so much. But I wouldn’t call it that. The movie ends before she’s ever really been published. This is really just exploring a couple months of her life when she found out that she was dying at 24 years old. And so the movie is really an exploration of her imagination.

This film references a famous quote from O’Connor: “I’m always irritated by people who think fiction is an escape from reality. It’s a plunge into reality.” That idea maps pretty directly onto the way that much of Wildcat explores O’Connor’s stories and mind rather than her life.

That quote, you know, was on the front of my notebook. It was the thesis of the film. If I told you what I did this morning and what I had for breakfast, you would know the facts of my life, but you wouldn’t know anything about me. If I told you what I dreamed about, if I told you what I was hoping for, what I was afraid of, we would be intimate. And that was the kind of idea of the movie: that I’m not going to tell you what happened to her, I’m going to tell you what she dreamed about. And through those dreams a portrait might arise. I wanted to make a movie about the inner life—this is a woman whose primary relationship in her life was with the divine, so how do you film that relationship?

One of my takeaways from this film was how critical O’Connor’s relationship with the South was to her writing and her work. I’m curious about your connection to the American South, and how that showed up in the way you wrote this film.

Our country’s relationship to our past is such a struggle. It’s like we’re caught in the first stage of grief, which is denial. And white people hate to look at racism. They hate to see it. They hate even more to see casual racism. [The idea of] good people who participate in racist systems and racist culture is very upsetting, but you can’t tell the story of America without telling that story. The wounds and crimes of this country are part of our story, and Flannery lived deeply in that.

The period of time we set the movie around, it was a living nightmare for her to be forced to live in Milledgeville. She was dying to get out of there. And then she basically never was allowed to leave again. And it blew my mind that her imagination was so intense. It just feels like she brought the whole world to her. How did she have this insight on humanity with such little interaction?

I had to pause the movie where she says, “Sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe.” But her illness was a major part of her life, her identity, and seemed to, instead of detract from her abilities, sort of enhance her creative life.

Isn’t that remarkable? I mean, that’s what she called them—“diminishments.” Constantly life was giving you these diminishments, and inside each one was a gift, if you could find it.

In addition to her Southern roots, religion was such an important part of her life. We are currently living in a really agnostic period—or, at least my generation in America seems to be. How do you imagine audiences connecting to O’Connor’s relationship to religion, when so many people, at this point, have sort of opted out of or rejected faith?

I find the recent generations have been really struggling with the negative aspects of organized religion, and the problems that it has created. But the danger is that if you don’t have any organized way to worship, what are you going to end up worshiping? And you start to see a culture that is worshiping status and accumulation of wealth and the self, right? Whereas there’s something about religion at its best that’s driving us towards humility; to seeing ourselves all as children of the same light, and the interconnectivity between all of us. There’s so much to be gained from the philosophies before us that a lot of really smart people did, and we just haven’t replaced them with much. It’s very helpful to break down what’s negative about organized religion, but I find the discipline of [O’Connor’s] faith, in the ways that she looked at the universe, really helped her. It gave an organizing principle to her mind, and it really allowed her to see the hypocrisy all around her.

And it’s a very interesting question. I mean, it’s been one of the problems with trying to give the film to the world: people are really uncomfortable with a movie that talks openly about God. One of the things that she does that’s so remarkable is that she doesn’t proselytize. And one of the things that I really enjoyed about Flannery O’Connor’s work is you could tell that she was a deeply educated and deeply philosophical human being, but she didn’t have an agenda with what you were supposed to believe.

A few years back, The New Yorker published a story titled “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” It explored her legacy and the ways in which she was obviously a product of and participant in much of the racist structures of the time. How did you reconcile all of that in your portrayal of her?

I wanted to be kind of a scientist about it, you know? Meaning, not have an opinion, just present it for you. This is the truth of our country. There were wonderful minds that participated in a lot of the ugliness that surrounds us all the time. I’m constantly haunted by the feeling that my grandkids, when they come, will say, “You drove a car? Didn’t you know?”

And then, right while we were writing the script, that article came out and it was really upsetting because I don’t want to glorify a racist. This is disgusting. I hate that kind of language and I hate that kind of thought. And at the same time, Well, should we stop making the movie? And I thought, no, because this conversation is important.

She was raised in the racist waters and grew up in the same soil and was fed the same food of the Jim Crow South. And I like the expression that she’s in recovery like America. She’s a racist in recovery. We’re still in the process of healing from terrible crimes, and it’s very difficult to talk about our past and not bump into this ugliness. But I let her just use her own language—you know, there’s a line from her that [goes], “The truth doesn’t change according to your ability to stomach it.” I tried to let her defend herself or just be herself. And you can think she’s not worthwhile to think about because of things she said at different moments of her life, and I respect that. I decided that she still has a lot to offer.

This conversation has been edited and condensed. Wildcat is in limited theaters in New York and Los Angeles.