Early on in the session, which was live-streamed, the star recalled coming to Venice for Dead Poets Society. “It was my first film festival. I was 18 years old. We showed the movie down the street, and it was an incredible experience,” Hawke recalled. “There were a lot of people who made the movie with us there at the premiere, and you could feel the movie cast a spell, and you could feel people’s response to the film.”
He continued that director Weir “was at that time, and still is, one of the very few master craftsmen I’ve ever met, and to work with him as a young person, and to absorb what he had to teach and then to see its effect in action” was impressive. “It was an act of collective imagination…. He was very good at getting a group of artisans to have the same imagination and the same dream, and then to watch that dream be given to others and received. It’s very powerful.”