Maya Hawke has only been operating in the entertainment industry for a mere five years, yet already she is making her mark. Appearing in the Quentin Tarantino masterpiece Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in just her second feature film role, Hawke learned a considerable amount from her co-stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt and Al Pacino, taking invaluable lessons from her time on the film.
Speaking about the incomparable experience of working on a Tarantino feature film, she told People during the premiere: “I’ve never been on a set where every single person who was there was equally as excited to be there as the actors, and the director and everyone were…He’s been working with the same people for so long, and he’s executed such amazing work. Everyone has a tremendous amount of faith in him and in the projects, and it gives an amazing collaborative feeling on set”.
Since then, Hawke has only gone from strength to strength, most significantly taking a role in the Netflix sensation Stranger Things as Robin Buckley, appearing beside the likes of Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown and Winona Ryder. Such success is only due to accelerate, too, with Hawke also cast in the latest Wes Anderson movie, Asteroid City, as well as Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born follow-up, Bernstein.
In 2019, undoubtedly the most influential year of the actor’s career to date, Hawke sat down with BuzzFeed (and a bunch of adorable puppies) to answer some of the most pressing questions sent in by fans, one of which being directed at her fondness for cinema.
Asked for her favourite movie of all time, Hakwe referenced an American art movie classic in Robert Altman’s Nashville, saying: “I just think it’s the most genius movie ever made”.
A quality choice, potentially informed by her parents’ own fine cinematic tastes, Altman’s film constructs a winding mosaic of American ideals, presenting a city blinded by hope, opportunity and patriotism. It fits in the playbook of American cinema that deconstructs time, place and person, demonstrated in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, and even Harmony Korine’s Gummo, together creating a scrapbook that works well to pick apart the American psyche.
Considered to be Altman’s magnum opus, Nashville paints a portrait of 1970s America, one spiked with political obsession and the distraction of celebrity. Starring 24 main characters, and many other contributing characters, the film is a sprawling anthropological examination of a certain sub-section of American society, as the city of Nashville gears up for a political convention.
