-Ethan Hawke, welcome back to the show!
-Thanks for having me, man. -We love you.
Thank you for doing that bit. Man, you can sing.
Willie Nelson, come on, baby!
[ Cheers and applause ] That is what I'm talking about.
And that was -- that was Ben Dickey.
-Ben Dickey is the star of "Blaze,"
and Charlie Sexton, who plays Townes Van Zandt in the movie.
-Dude, that was fantastic!
That was so much fun to play with you.
Thank you for doing that. -Well I've never done a bit
like that, I'm all nervous. It was really fun, man.
-I love seeing you nervous. It was great.
-I feel like I've been shot out of a cannon.
-Oh, man. But is it true that Willie Nelson
was your first concert ever?
-My first concert in 1976.
My dad drives me from Fort Worth to Austin
in a 1976 Plymouth Barracuda.
-Wow. -We got iron-on shirts,
Green Hawke and Black Hawke.
I don't know. We wanted Willie to recognize us.
-Yeah. -And we sat on the back
of the trunk, and, you know, watched the show.
And I've been obsessed with outlaw country ever since.
-Really? -Yeah.
-I mean, did you ever get to meet Willie?
-Well, believe it or not, a few years ago,
I got to bring my dad to see Willie Nelson here in New York.
-Wait a second. How great is that?
[ Cheers and applause ] -Wait, wait.
Don't applaud yet! Don't applaud yet.
We got -- because through a friend of a friend
of a friend of a friend, I got invited back on the bus.
And my dad and I walked on, and we got to meet Willie.
And my dad was very sweet. He said, you know,
he told Willie how much his music had meant to him.
And Willie was very sweet back
and offered us a hit off his joint, you know?
[ Laughter ]
And my dad and I each like looked at each other like,
"Are you going to do this?" And we both said,
"No, thank you Mr. Nelson." And we walked out.
And my dad said -- It was very surprising,
because my dad is a very serious man, an actuary.
And he said, "You know, maybe we should have taken
a hit of that joint."
[ Laughter ] And I said,
"I know, I felt like I didn't want to do it because you."
And he said, "I didn't want to do it
because I wanted to be a good father."
[ Laughter ] Oh, geez. You know,
missed opportunity, right? -Yeah.
-Well, lo and behold, a few years after that,
I'm doing a play with an actor
who knows Willie, and Willie's coming to see the show.
And I told her the story about us missing this opportunity.
Willie comes backstage, he meets me and goes like this.
He goes like this, slips a joint in my hand,
and says, "Say hi to your dad."
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
-Yes! -That's a true story.
-How much do you love Willie Nelson
to say hi to your dad? -I know, I know, I know.
-Redemption! I got to say,
I just watched the movie "Blaze."
I'm holding up the vinyl, because I'm just so psyched
that you have a soundtrack on vinyl, which no one does.
-It's so good, too. -It's pretty rad.
This movie is -- it's fantastic, dude.
-Thank you, Jimmy.
-I'm sorry to keep calling you dude.
-It's okay, dude. -All right, dude.
It's just that joint. -Yeah, we're both in that space.
-Dude, "Blaze," you know what I'm saying?
[ Laughter ] But it's not about that blaze.
It's a different blaze. -It's about Blaze Foley,
singer-songwriter who was shot and killed in 1989.
And what the movie really centers around
is A, his music, and B, his love story.
He fell in love in a treehouse with this woman, Sybil Rosen.
She wrote a memoir called
"Living in the Woods in a Tree," right?
And this book is so -- it's so powerful.
-Did you know his music? -I knew it.
Okay, so, Ben, who is the star of the movie,
he's a musician that I've been following for years.
And I kept waiting. I just -- you know when you meet somebody,
and you're like, "oh, this guy's going to break and be huge."
-Yeah. -And I started realizing
that a lot of his story is Blaze's story,
and he's from Arkansas.
The blues, and folk music means a lot to Ben.
And I knew that if I gave him an opportunity to play this part,
he would repay me tenfold, and he did.
-It's well-played by everyone.
-Alia Shawkat. -She's wonderful.
Fantastic. And then, I saw Richard Linklater in there.
-Yes, right. -Who I know is a friend of yours
and a great director. -Well he directed me
in "Boyhood," the "Before" trilogy.
-"Before Sunrise." -Yeah.
-The guy's a genius. He's the best.
But I've never seen him act. -I know, it's fun to get him
in front of the camera. -Were you nervous directing him?
-I wasn't until it started.
You know, like -- because I love Rick.
And I was like, "Oh, come on down.
You'll be in the movie. It will be really fun."
And then, all of a sudden,
we're shooting, he starts asking questions
about how I'm handling everything.
And all of a sudden, I felt like, I don't know --
Like a sophomore in high school was pretending to be director.
-Yeah. -But I had one of my favorite
moments in the whole shoot was we were doing a scene
with Ben, and you know, he was playing Blaze,
and he was doing the scene where he gets beat up
and then has to go play a song.
And I'm watching the scene, I'm watching the scene,
and I look over and I see Rick just hypnotized,
staring at Ben's performance.
And I looked over and I said, "Cut,"
And he went --
-So, all right, that's enough, you can leave now.
Get out of here. -Don't watch me blow it.
-Yeah, exactly, yeah.
When you watch this movie, and I say this in the best way,
you could almost smell beer coming out of it.
[ Laughter ]
It is so, like, get into that, like, dive bar.
And these gigs that he's playing.
These gigs, he would get thrown out of these bars.
-Yeah. -And he was never allowed
to play these big arenas or anything.
-Most biopics are just about people who are famous, right?
-Yeah. -And so the movie ends up
being about the trials of celebrity or something.
Where as most of the musicians I've met in my life
have been met with an extreme amount of indifference,
like a lot of artists.
And so, by telling Blaze Foley's story,
we're allowed to tell the story of an artist
who's really fighting and keeps fighting,
and keeps fighting without getting
a lot of the superficial paybacks that, you know,
the normal biopics show.
-And the songs are beautiful. Oh, my gosh.
I can't even tell you enough to just stream the soundtrack
on Spotify or buy the vinyl and just let it crackle
and listen to it. It is beautiful.