Ethan Hawke has been to Sundance Film Festival many, many times before.
The prolific actor, producer and filmmaker, whose “Before Sunrise” and “Before Midnight” premiered at the festival (among many others), was back at the festival with “The Weight,” from director Padraic McKinley. Set in Oregon in 1933, Sundance programming describes “The Weight” as a “tense, atmospheric Depression-era crime drama” following a group of “desperate convicts on a perilous journey through a physically and morally treacherous backcountry.”
The script was still a work-in-progress when producers Nathan and Simon Fields (Fields Entertainment) presented it to McKinley, who sent it to Hawke — but there was “something cool about the world of it,” the actor recalled. He was also drawn to the idea of playing a character who doesn’t say much.
“[That was the] reason to do the movie,” Hawke told TheWrap executive editor Adam Chitwood at Sundance. “I was sitting there cutting this documentary about Paul Newman, and staring at ‘Hud’ and staring at ‘Cool Hand Luke’ and staring even at Butch, where the nonverbal moments are the moments. And I’m a person who loves to talk, right? I can’t shut myself up, and I like verbiage in a performance.”
The actor said he had a vision for the character and “what the silences could be,” pitching McKinley on his take on the role.
Hawke and the filmmaker also both liked the film’s title, which reminded them of the 1968 song of the same name by The Band. With Hawke attached, McKinley knew that the producers would pay for a rewrite. Hawke suggested Shelby Gaines, a multi-hyphenate who had helped on his series “The Good Lord Bird” and “Wildcat,” which Hawke co-wrote, produced and directed.
“We started reinventing from movies that I think we all were talking about, as far as adventure and action films that were inspired from the ‘60s, ‘70s, early ‘80s. And at the time, Ethan was doing his Paul Newman documentary, and he was thinking, Well, there’s characters I want to play within those things – a stoic and quiet, pragmatic character,” McKinley told TheWrap during our 2026 Sundance Interview Series. “We started daydreaming about a movie based on those chords.
“We reinvented the melody and the tempo and everything like that about it. And Shelby went away and wrote a f–king masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned, and then I sent it to Russell [Crowe]. He agreed. He thinks it’s an incredible script, incredible story. We went straight to production. They said it took five years to get going and four-and-a-half months from the day we started pre-production to the last time on the AVID.”
And it’s true – the film started production last July. That’s fast. Hawke recounted the filming experience as one “made super independently,” which ultimately added to the texture of the movie.
“I think you can smell it, and I can’t ever figure out when you watch movies, they all have a subconscious and when you smell that – that it’s got a ton of bells and whistles, and people are taking private planes to set and you smell it,” Hawke said. “And yet, it’s fun to get paid a lot of money, it’s fun to have a lot of toys, but it’s also more fun not to because then you have to get really inventive, and then it puts pressure on the movie to be the movie we said we wanted it to be. You have to come up with what’s the heart, soul way to communicate the idea, not the expensive way to communicate the idea.”
Austin Amelio, who was in TheWrap’s studio at last year’s Sundance for his bizarre, affecting performance in “Bunnylvr” and the year before that with Richard Linklater’s romantic thriller “Hit Man,” said that despite the low budget and strenuous conditions, he knew they were capturing something special.
“That was also a testament to Pat, because every time we got to set, he knew exactly what he wanted and what was going,” he said. “Even if we had a long scene, four hours of shooting or whatever, you have trust that he does have really good taste. When we got something, it was like, OK, I think we all felt like we got it.”
