Ethan Hawke Talks About Joining the Horror Genre with Daybreakers
Posted 01.05.10 by Ryan
Ethan Hawke is not the typical choice for a horror movie actor, and the upcoming Daybreakers is accordingly his first picture in the genre. Hawke explained to ShockTillYouDrop why he decided to appear in a vampire movie.
I wanted to do something I hadn't done. My first movie [Explorers] was with Joe Dante and all he'd talk about with Roger Corman, and those kinds of pictures like The Howling and Piranha, those are his first — he'd talk passionately about the power of genre filmmaking and what it can be. I have some base awareness of it, but I fancy myself a dramatic actor and I had finished Tom Stoppard's [play] The Coast of Utopia, which is nine hours about mid-19th century Russian radicals, and [Daybreakers], a vampire movie, sounded like a lot of fun.
Despite the current vampire craze, Hawke says Daybreakers will add something "new" to the genre.
It's new because it's the first post-adolescent vampire movie in a while. It's refreshing to see. It's new for the genre in that it's not inundated with Christian superstition. It's rooted in sci-fi more than it is in some underworld thing. There's a virus and I think it's fun — half futuristic movie, half sci-fi, and half film noir. There are aspects at the beginning where it looks like a [Humphrey] Bogart film.
The latest clip from Daybreakers doesn't appear like it would have belonged in Bogart's oeuvre, but perhaps it isn't from the movie's beginning.
Next Showing: Daybreakers opens January 8