The Last Movie Stars

As asked by a Hollywood power couple, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Ethan Hawke embarked on creating a documentary film based on them. During his research, he uncovered that Stewart Stern, Newman's screenwriting friend, had conducted multiple interviews with Newman for what would become Newman's memoirs. Although Newman destroyed the audio recordings of these interviews, Stern had transcribed them. Hawke then adapted this project by having many of his actor friends read the transcriptions, thus incorporating not only Newman and Woodward’s words but also those of their numerous family and colleagues into the film. The documentary features archive footage associated with the couple, interspersed with Hawke's interviews with these friends about their perspectives of the Newman/Woodward story.