‘It felt dangerous. You got naggy’: Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater on power, combovers and Blue Moon

Ahead of their 11th movie together, the actor and director discuss musicals, the legacy of Philip Seymour Hoffman and what being bald and 5ft tall does to your flirting skills

‘I like this, it’s good,” Ethan Hawke tells Richard Linklater, midway through a lively digression that has already hopped from politics to the Beatles to the late films of John Huston. “What’s good?” asks Linklater. “All of this,” says Hawke, by which he means the London hotel suite with its coffee table, couch and matching upholstered armchairs; the whole chilly machinery of the international press junket. “I like that we get to spend a couple of days in a room,” he says. “It feels like a continuation of the same conversation we’ve been having for the past 32 years.”

It’s all about the conversation with Linklater and Hawke. The two men like to talk; often the talk sparks a film. The director and actor first met backstage at a play in 1993 (“Sophistry, by Jon Marc Sherman,” says Linklater) and wound up chatting until dawn. The talk laid the ground for what would eventually become Before Sunrise, a star-crossed romance that channelled an off-screen bromance as it sent Hawke and Julie Delpy wandering around mid-90s Vienna, walking and talking and stopping to kiss. “Yeah, that was the moment. That set the tone,” says Linklater, remembering. “Meeting Ethan backstage, then flying out to Vienna.”