TELLS NYFCC CROWD HOW THEY ALL ATTENDED OZU SCREENINGS TOGETHER, ETC.
At The New York Film Critics Circle’s annual awards dinner Monday, Martin Scorsese presented the Best Screenplay award to Paul Schrader for First Reformed (image here cropped from a tweet by Alissa Wilkinson). In his ten-minute intro for the award, Scorsese mentioned meeting Schrader via Brian De Palma, saying that the three of them would go to screenings of Yasujirō Ozu films together. According to IndieWire's Zack Sharf, Scorsese added that Schrader's license plate back then read O-Z-U. "After discussing how their shared love of John Ford’s The Searchers and Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest made them fast friends," writes Sharf, "Scorsese championed First Reformed: 'I was so impressed and moved by the way Paul discusses the nature of faith and how it’s bolstered by Ethan Hawke, who gives such a magnificent performance and goes so deep into his character’s pain, into his long, twisted road to understanding.'”Hawke won the NYFCC Best Actor award for First Reformed, and Sharf quotes much of the actor's acceptance speech:
“My mother gave birth to me when she was 18 and one of the things she hid from her father was her subscription to The New Yorker magazine,” Hawke said. “It’s a weird thing to combine white trash and The New Yorker, but that’s my family. When I was growing up, what she used to do was save The New Yorker and whatever Pauline Kael reviewed was the movie we would go see. After we saw it, we would read Pauline Kael’s review, which we often did disagree with. … Even after ‘Dead Poets Society’ came out I had to go home and sit at the dinner table and read Pauline Kael’s very negative review of that movie. ‘The whole thing is wrapped in a gold bow like a bunch of bullshit. If I have to see another movie that makes me glad I’m alive I’ll have to kill myself,” is what I think she said.”Hawke’s ability to pivot from humorous anecdote to profound meditation remains unmatched. “In my life, I have witnessed big business absolutely devour an extremely young art form,” he said at the end of his speech. “We live in a culture that hero worships the accumulation of wealth and then acts surprised about who we elect as our officials. Film criticism establishes a different barometer of success and it teaches audiences what to look for, how to watch movies, how to listen to stories, and I’m so grateful to articulate why all these movies you are celebrating tonight matter, because they matter to me.”
According to Paula Schwartz at Showbiz 411, Hawke also spoke of Roger Ebert: "He’s the only critic that matters. I don’t understand this, but okay, at the Cannes Film Festival Roger Ebert gave me a toast as the most successful, the only successful American actor who has never killed anybody on screen. I was about 30 years old and I knew that I was going to kill people. I knew, I did. I knew that there was no way it was going to last. I respected the attention, but I learned from Roger Ebert that it matters what we put into the world and I was extremely inspired by the critics of art."
See Also:
Mark Jacobson, Vulture
In Conversation: Paul Schrader