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Ethan and Maya Hawke Almost Abandoned ‘Wildcat’ After Discovering Flannery O’Connor’s Racist Letters

Director Ethan Hawke on why he and daughter actress Maya Hawke didn't abandon their Flannery O'Connor biopic 'Wildcat' after her racist letters.

As Hawke dug deeper into research, one of the things he needed to reconcile in his own mind was the sharp contradiction between the casual bigotry O’Connor expressed in the letters and how her fiction sharply held a mirror to the hypocrisy of religious white southerners. That includes “Revelation,” in which a deeply devoted, racist woman (here, O’Connor’s own mother, played by Laura Linney) has a vision of Jesus, who tells her the only path to salvation is to be reborn as a Black person (but using a horrid epithet) or “white trash.” Hawke dug into the scholarship on O’Connor and race, seeking guidance from a number of artists and colleagues, as well as experts like the DreamYard Project, who organize anti-racist programming in New York schools, and Shelton Fabre, the Archbishop of Louisville, whose first question to the “Wildcat” co-writer and director was “Why do you want to make a movie about a racist?”

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