In a recent interview, actor Ethan Hawke put his Logan comments from August into context.
Earlier this year, Ethan Hawke talked about the 2017 film, Logan, where he called the film a “fine superhero film” but didn’t really consider it a great film. The comments were not taken well and caused something of an explosion on social media. During an interview promoting his next film, Blaze, he talked a bit about his comments and how people seemed to misinterpret the meaning behind his words.
At first he talked about the nature of comic books, their stigmatization and how this has changed:
One of the things that is cool about that is that’s because for a long time-I thought about this for a little bit-for a long time comic books and people who cared about comic books were ghettoized. And it was made to feel small. And now they run the table! And there’s been this giant switch in my lifetime.
He then went on to discuss his own love of comic books, being a geek and why he said what he said:
I mean like I am a comic book geek. I’ve seen all those-the idea that I’m the one criticizing them is a joke because there’s very few things that I enjoy more-it’s what I try to teach my son-that…um…something about being a geek is being real. That’s what it means. I’m going to be real!
It’s just like man, I love this! And I don’t think you should be scared to say that you love something or that you hate something and that’s the job of movies and music. It’s not to be liked. It’s to stir up conversation. And I was talking about a much more nuances point about money in America and what our obsession with the accumulation of wealth is. Some of the most talented-I mean Scott Derrickson Doctor Strange is amazing. Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight. James Mangold’s Logan. I cited those because they are my favorites and people took me as criticizing them. What I was trying to say is we need a community that’s making all kinds of movies so that were-it’s a part of it. I think it pisses people off because they don’t want to go back to the ghetto where comic books weren’t taken seriously as art. And I agree with that.
You can see the full interview below:
From the sound of things, Hawke probably should have chosen his words a bit more carefully during that first interview. Logan was by far one of the most critically acclaimed films of the entire superhero film genre and was the first to be nominated for a major Academy Award since The Dark Knight. All the same it is worth noting that he seemed very open to the idea of superhero films but wants them to be part of a much larger community and used in the context of much larger conversations. And that is an idea worthy of discussion.
What did make of Ethan Hawke’s Logan comments? Should he have chosen his words more carefully? Should people not get so bent out of shape over someone disliking a film? Let us know what you think in the comments below!