Ethan Hawke: Censorship makes ideas important again

In a wide-ranging Q and A, part of Deutsche Bank Bafta A Life in Pictures, Hawke praised the director Richard Linklater, not least for giving proper prominence to the female characters in both the “Before…” trilogy of films in which he co-starred with Julie Delpy and Boyhood, the movie shot with Patricia Arquette for a few days every year for 12 years.

Boygood gave Arquette the chance to be “a lover and a mother, she is a teacher and a student, she is gorgeous and she is unappealing” in contrast with “how few opportunities women have in film” in general.

Men were offered three-dimensional roles but women were faced with being “some idealised vision or a witch – frankly most of the time they’re asked to be naked or dead,” he said.

He revealed he cannot publish his third novel even though “I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done” because “my 16-year-old will have a cardiac arrest.”

He dismissed the barriers between supposedly high and low art. “The joy of working on Shakespeare is when it is done well, it’s not actually high art.”

And he reminisced on film-making with three talents who all died prematurely in River Phoenix, Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman and the beauty of Jude Law with whom he worked on Gattaca. “It was like Peter O’Toole walked in.”