Behind the Story: Wildcat

Going behind the story on Ethan Hawke’s recently-released movie about Southern writer Flannery O’Connor

Raise your hand if your first exposure to Flannery O’Conner’s writing came through a college reading assignment. 

Now, answer this: Which side of the line do you fall on: loving O’Connor’s books or hating them? Because with Flannery O’Connor there’s usually very little in-between. 

Flannery O’Connor, an American novelist and short story writer, lived much of her life in Milledgeville, Georgia. Known as a Southern Gothic writer, her stories tend to be a little dark with heavy religious overtones. O’Connor, a Catholic, who once famously described the Southern U.S. as “Christ-haunted,” was heavily influenced by her faith, and her novels and short stories show people attempting to live out their faith in deeply flawed, grotesque and often tragic ways. 

If you’ve read O’Connor’s work, it was probably one of her collections of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. Her work can be described as violent and grotesque, and her characters often find themselves in painful, embarrassing and even ludicrous situations. But somehow, through all of that, O’Connor seemed dedicated to showing these deeply flawed, sinful, misinformed people as open to God’s divine grace. 

Take all of that into account—and then consider this: Ethan Hawke wrote and released a movie earlier this year on Flannery O’Connor and the intersection between faith and imagination. 

Wildcat, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September 2023, opened for limited release in May. It follows O’Connor as she’s working to publish Wise Blood, one of her full-length novels and stars Maya Hawke, Ethan’s daughter, as Flannery. 

With all that in mind, we’re going behind the story to learn more about Hawke’s approach to telling O’Connor’s story, the unique way he decided to do so and what he hopes movie-goers gain from the movie. 

Where did the idea for a Flannery O’Connor movie come from? 

In a letter from the director for an event held in May promoting the movie at The Beverly Theater, Hawke said his daughter, Maya, known for her role in “Stranger Things,” used a monologue from O’Connor’s prayer journal for her Julliard audition and years later, came back to her parents with the idea to make a movie about O’Connor. 

Since much of O’Connor’s life was spent on the farm in Georgia where she grew up, ostensibly “feeding chickens” as O’Connor liked to say, a movie about her life presented some obstacles. “Instead of trying to make a traditional cradle-to-grave biopic, I set out, with my writing partner Shelby Gaines, to use the work of Flannery O’Connor to explore the creative process as an act of faith,” Hawke said in the letter from the director. That led to the idea to tell the story of O’Connor’s life through the lens of her lupus diagnosis and “ intercut it with vignettes of her short stories,” using the vignettes as “active explorations” of questions O’Connor may have been asking herself.

Was it challenging to explore O’Connor’s writing in this way? 

In a word, yes. In an interview for Russell Moore’s podcast, the two discussed O’Connor’s divisiveness, mentioning that readers either love or hate her work, but there’s usually no in-between. Hawke said, “She does kind of undress humanity — there isn’t a human being in which she can’t see the way they’re lying to themselves. Her stories involve human beings who are really struggling in their daily lives and are offered a moment of grace, or offered an opportunity to heal, and they refuse it, they turn away from it. She does not make you feel good; she challenges your brain.” 

What did the writing process look like? 

For Hawke and his co-writer, it looked like reading O’Connor’s work in its entirety, as well as her letters, journals and other writings. “One of the things that was very obvious was that regardless of the final form of the film, it was going to focus on the inner life,” Hawke said in an interview with the National Catholic Reporter. “This idea started to float to the top for us: What if "Wildcat" was a movie not just about imagination, but about the place where faith, imagination and reality intersect? O'Connor is an incredibly interesting subject matter if that is your thesis and starting point.” To round out the screenplay, Hawke and Gaines also read books written about Flannery O’Connor and her work, possibly including The Terrible Speed of Mercy, a spiritual biography of O’Connor written by Rabbit Room author Jonathan Rodgers. 

Sources: 

• “Letter from the Director,” The Beverly Theater. 

• “The Russell Moore Show,” Ethan Hawke on Flannery O’Connor’s Christian Imagination. May 1, 2024. Available here. 

• Zachary Lee. “Flannery on film: An exclusive interview with Ethan Hawke, director of 'Wildcat',” The National Catholic Reporter, May 23, 2024. Available here. 

To learn more about the movie, visit wildcat.oscilloscope.net. As an Amazon Associate, The Bookery earns from qualified purchases.