Ethan Hawke, director of the upcoming biopic wild cat, She has a personal connection to the works of Flannery O’Connor, having been introduced to the acclaimed author by her mother.

However, it was his daughter Maya Hawke who brought him closer to the more intimate side of the author’s life.

While preparing for her Juilliard audition as a teenager, Maya discovered O’Connor prayer journal, Which contained deeply personal thoughts written by a yet-to-be-published author and addressed to God.

As Maya’s acting career gained momentum with her role stranger things, When she wrote those journal entries she found herself at the same age as O’Connor.

This relationship inspired Maya to acquire the rights to “Prayer Journal”, and propose to her father that they adapt it into a film in which she would play the role of O’Connor.

With this shared vision, the father-daughter duo embarked on the journey of bringing Flannery O’Connor’s introspective writings to life on the big screen.

It wasn’t until the screenwriting process was well underway that Ethan Hawke discovered a more disturbing aspect of Flannery O’Connor’s legacy.

In Paul Ealy’s 2020 article for The New Yorker, titled How racist was Flannery O’Connor?The reference was to arch quotations from the author’s personal correspondence.

They discuss this disturbing discovery in an upcoming episode of indiewire Toolkit Podcast.

Referring to the racist content in O’Connor’s personal letters, he said, “I wasn’t aware of any dark element of people finding letters and some extremely ugly things.”

The director revealed that this new information made him question the feasibility of the project.

“I didn’t know anything about it until we got deeper into this project, and I said to Maya, Well, should we just leave? How scared are we of having this conversation?”

Hawk admitted to reacting quickly to the troubling revelations and considering whether to abandon “Wildcat” altogether.

However, she also recalled the writer Alice Walker’s viewpoint: “People don’t throw away their talents.”

Ethan Hawke, director of the upcoming film, said, “If you honestly talk about America’s history, you’ll talk about America’s crimes and America’s wounds.” wild cat.

A film exploring the life and work of author Flannery O’Connor has faced controversy due to the discovery of racist comments in the author’s personal correspondence.

In discussing systemic racism, Hawk highlighted a common misconception.

“People, if they want to talk about racism, they generally like to do it in the framework that racism is really bad. They have horns on their heads. They’re doing terrible things.

Whereas the real history of systemic racism is that it involves many supposedly good people taking advantage of their privileged position to do things that are very harmful to other people.”