Ethan Hawke Finds His Yoda in New Doc 'Seymour: An Introduction'

At first glance, Seymour Bernstein doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’d command your immediate attention: He’s small and hunched, with a receding crest of gray hair. But the 87-year-old piano instructor has a way of commanding attention and respect with a soft voice, which dispenses wisdom and insight on life and art, always in complete sentences. And though Ethan Hawke never studied music under Bernstein, he has nonetheless become an eager pupil of his lessons about creativity and fulfillment — so much so that, over the last few years, Bernstein has served as a sort of Yoda-like guru to the actor, a relationship documented in Hawke’s new documentary, Seymour: An Introduction.

The two met several years ago at a Manhattan dinner party, benefactors of a random but fateful table pairing arranged by a mutual friend. Hawke was going through a sudden case of self-doubt and stage fright, and felt comfortable enough around the octogenarian to spill his guts. Bernstein, Hawke would learn, was a famous concert pianist who had suffered the same plight back in the 1970s, and had to teach himself to cope with the anxiety. He overcame the difficulties in a well-received recital at Lincoln Center in 1977 before abruptly retiring to a life of teaching and composing in what should have been the prime of his performing career.

“I think one of the biggest [problems] with anxiety that I learned from Seymour is having shame attached to it, [or] pretending that you don’t have it,” Hawke said, while looking admiringly at Bernstein during an interview with Yahoo Movies earlier this month. “Just speaking openly with Seymour about it was a big help. And realizing that you have a right to [be nervous], and [that] it’s probably a sign that you’re taking what you’re doing extremely seriously — and [that] you can, in fact, be proud of it.”

Hawke’s friendship with Bernstein blossomed, and after some encouragement from his wife Ryan (who is a producer on the film), he decided to make a documentary so that Bernstein’s ideas about art and self might spread beyond the small, cloistered world of the Manhattan classical music scene. Seymour: An Introduction is part bio-doc and part self-help video; Hawke’s camera spends a lot of time in Bernstein’s small Upper West Side studio apartment, watching him teach young students. But he also captures the pianist in candid moments, in which he discusses the hard-learned lessons that come from pursuing one’s passions.

In the teaching scenes, Bernstein is depicted as sweet but firm, often demanding hard work from his students so that none of their talent goes unused. In a recent post-screening Q&A, Bernstein admonished an audience member who had confessed to practicing the same pieces over and over. “It’s because you’re lazy,” Bernstein told the young questioner. “Your talent is autonomous. You neglect your talent, it’s going to make you miserable. It’s even going to affect your health. And before we part, I hope you get really miserable.”

The remark struck a chord with Hawke, who says he has long feared getting stuck in a creative rut; in particular, he keeps in mind a particular scene in Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Long Day’s Journey Into Night that represents his worst nightmare.

“The father is talking about what a good actor he could have been,” Hawke says, “and that always hit home for me as a young person — hearing that older man talking about how much he hates himself for not trying to be a better actor, taking the easy money by doing the same play for 30 years. The reason you see people getting miserable on a long-running TV show or something is they’re being under-challenged and overworked simultaneously. Some people are really excited about it, but I’ve had friends that have kind of gone to sleep, and their talent gets so miserable that it ruins their whole life.”

Hawke has consciously avoided such boredom. “As you get older, you ask more of yourself, and you want a deeper level of challenge,” he said. “Things without meaning are more tiring to me now than they were 20 years ago.” In order to keep it meaningful, he’s branched out: Hawke has written two novels (one of which, The Hottest State, he also directed as a film); acted on Broadway; directed several off-Broadway productions; and collaborated with Richard Linklater on eight different films, including the 12-years-in-the-making family epic Boyhood.

In a quirk of timing and perhaps fate, Hawke had to shuttle between the arduous Oscar campaign for Boyhood (the film was nominated for Best Picture, and he had a Best Supporting Actor nod) and the comparatively small-scale PR blitz for Seymour: An Introduction. It was an odd but helpful experience, he said, to escape the awards season pressure cooker to return to a project that reminded him of the true reason he has devoted himself to the arts.

Hawke says that working with Bernstein helped him realize that it “didn’t matter who wins,” and he would ultimately lose the Oscar to Whiplash’s J.K. Simmons, while Boyhood fell in the Best Picture race to Birdman. But the campaign was hardly a waste of time, Hawke said, because he was getting to have his own pupil, so to speak, in the young actor Ellar Coltrane, who played his son in Boyhood.

“I learned a lot [from the campaign],” Hawke said. “[I’d say,] ‘I don’t want to drink too much because Ellar is here.’ So [I’d] end up staying sober and end up having an even more interesting time. Whereas, if I had been not looking after another person, I probably would have had too many drinks, said some things I wished I hadn’t said, and fallen asleep. But in the guise of helping somebody else, I became the person I was trying to be for him.”

In that way, Hawke was acting out the main thesis of Seymour: An Introduction, which is that to be one’s best self requires making art an extension of life. He very clearly admires Bernstein — he stayed silent for the first quarter of the interview, in deference to his new teacher — and enthuses about the usually grueling process of creating DVD extras, so that he can re-visit Bernstein’s lessons.

And they seem to be working.

“Ethan is the one who actually enunciated the thesis of what the documentary was about, which is how a passion for an art form can not only influence the art form, but influence your life,” Bernstein said. “In other words, Ethan the actor — and Ethan the husband and father — are not separated anymore.”