Talking during the Berlin Film Festival (via Variety), Hawke was asked about his daughter’s remarks, to which he replies, “I really feel for these people. It’s really hard… Sometimes I’ll be setting a movie up and someone will say, ‘Oh, you should cast Suzie.’ I’m like, ‘Who is she?’ ‘She has 10 million followers.’ I’m like, ‘OK cool, has she acted before?’ ‘No, but…’ And you’re like, ‘Wow, so this is going to help me get the movie made? This is crazy.’… So if I don’t have this public-facing [platform], I don’t have a career? And if I get more followers I might get that part? What?”

For context, here’s a clip of Maya Hawke talking during Happy Sad Confused explaining how IG followers have become a factor when it comes to getting movies greenlit. Check this out:

Going back to Ethan Hawke though, he believes that the young actors on social media are putting too much emphasis on looking physically attractive. Hawke shares, “I wish they could meet [Phillip Seymour Hoffman] like I did when I was 18, because it’s a much more substantive and enjoyable life… I mean, go to the gym if you want to, but that doesn’t make you — Robert De Niro is not great because he has a six-pack. If the part calls for it, he’ll do it, and that’s awesome. But he’s so much more than that.”

Admittedly, there have been a lot of changes in the movie-making process besides casting. Some have also said that there has been a call for content that people can follow passively (i.e., they can watch it while doing chores, working out)—resulting in what some people are calling ‘Netflix slop’.

Who knows, maybe a movie renaissance is going to find its way back to audiences soon, but for now, it does seem like social media and AI are going to be huge factors when it comes to making movies today.

The film has just gotten finer with age, and Nolan has released a statement with a fun quote from another Matthew McConaughey role. Check this out:

“New generations of filmgoers discover and connect with the film in ways we’d never foreseen. To paraphrase another great McConaughey performance, “we get older… Interstellar stays the same age.”

Just in case you had no idea where the quote comes from, that’s from McConaughey’s first ever role in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused which came out in 1993. The original quote by McConaughey’s character David Wooderson goes, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, I keep getting older, and they stay the same age.”

For context, Wooderson is a man in his 20s who still hangs out with high schoolers and hits on young teenage girls. You’d just never think that anything that character says would be used by an auteur director to describe one of his most celebrated works.

Admittedly, Interstellar was not the most beloved film by Nolan fans when it came out. After hits like The Dark Knight and Inception, Interstellar had been bashed for several plot holes in the story regarding time and how McConaughey’s character Coop uses ‘love’ to solve the film’s entire problem.

If anything Interstellar is one of Nolan’s ‘feel, don’t think’ films—kind of like his latter movie Tenet. The overall story and emotional arcs make sense; just don’t ask too many questions about why things are happening.

Talking to Entertainment Tonight, Black says:

“All those kids — dig this — they were 10 years old when we made that movie and now they’re all, like, 30… We’re gonna get together and have a 20-year anniversary. We like to jam. I’m looking forward to seeing all of the grownups from School of Rock.”

We’re not really expecting the reunion to be a televised event, but Black did say he was going to post videos and pics on social media.

Though it is going to be great to see how everyone from the cast has grown, one member who won’t be coming back is Kevin Clark, who played the band’s drummer Freddy. Back in 2021, Clark was struck and killed by a vehicle while he was riding on bicycle in Chicago. He did make it to the 2013 reunion though, where Black and the former child actors all jammed together and played songs from the film.

We don’t expect Black to release any details about the reunion since it sounds like a personal event, but it would be great if they could get director Richard Linklater to make some kind of update on the character of Dewey Finn and the kids he taught to rock.

We don’t know what date the School of Rock reunion is going to take place, but the movie did come out in September back in ’03, so maybe we could get it sometime later in the year.