Ethan and Maya Hawke and Laura Linney on their maverick Flannery O'Connor biopic 'Wildcat'
TELLURIDE, Colo. — As literary icons go, Flannery O'Connor is hardly the most obvious candidate for a biopic.
The Georgia-born O'Connor is widely revered for her darkly humorous, often grotesque and violent Southern Gothic novels and short stories, including "Wise Blood" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge," which explore themes of faith, redemption, race and good and evil. But the author, who died in 1964 at age 39 from complications from lupus, spent the last 14 years of her life writing at her typewriter in the same room. Not exactly the stuff of gripping cinematic drama.
O'Connor herself once predicted (wrongly, it turns out) that there would never be any biographies of her, explaining, "Lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy."
But director Ethan Hawke's latest film, "Wildcat," which premiered last week at the Telluride Film Festival, is not a conventional biopic. Just as O'Connor upended literary expectations, the film — starring Hawke's daughter Maya as O'Connor and Laura Linney as her sanctimonious mother, Regina — scrambles the genre's usual formula, interweaving scenes from the author's life with dramatizations of four of her stories.
In addition and appeared earlier this year in "Wildcat" marks the most challenging project she's taken on to date.
