Ethan Hawke was in Nashville over the weekend for the premier of his new film Blaze. Blaze pays homage to Blaze Foley, the unsung songwriting legend of the Texas outlaw music movement that spawned the likes of Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. The movie stars Ben Dickey, Charlie Sexton, Alia Shawkat, Josh Hamilton, Richard Linklater, Alynda Segarra, Sam Rockwell, Steve Zahn and Kris Kristofferson.
In addition to attending the film’s premier at Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, Hawke, along with the film’s stars Ben Dickey and Charlie Sexton, enjoyed an exclusive tour of Outlaws & Armadillos: Country’s Roaring 70s at the Country Music Hall of Fame ® and Museum this past weekend. Museum Senior Director, Producer and Writer Peter Cooper and Senior Museum Editor Michael Gray, who co-curated the exhibit with Austin filmmaker Eric Geadelmann, joined Hawke, Dickey and Sexton on the tour of the museum’s latest exhibition.
Outlaws & Armadillos explores this era of cultural and artistic exchange between Nashville, Tenn., and Austin, Texas, and recognizes those artists who shaped it.
In an interview with the New York Times, Hawke said he’d been wanting to do a film about Foley who died in 1989. It was Hawke’s wife, Ryan, who introduced him to Ben Dickey who bore a resemblance to Foley. Filmed in Baton Rouge, Louisana, Hawke purchased a 1973 truck which Hawke says you will see in the background of the movie many times. Wanting the film to feel like a “Sunday afternoon, where you wake up late and decide to ‘listen to music and watercolor while you watch a football game or something like that.’ He wanted the stakes to feel low even though they weren’t. He told Mr. Dickey that they’d be spending the first week just doing screen tests, and Mr. Hawke would let the camera run while Mr. Dickey and Alia Shawkat, who played Ms. Rosen, sat and talked. But they weren’t screen tests. Mr. Hawke was making his movie,” stated the New York Times.
There are a few more showings of Blaze this week, see the schedule here.
For more information about the exhibit and the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, visit www.
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