A short way into the first chapter of The Last Movie Stars — the six-hour documentary that Ethan Hawke directed about the lives, careers and marriage of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward — Sam Rockwell pops into the frame, on a Zoom call. Then come Laura Linney, Billy Crudup, LaTanya Richardson Jackson, Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Kazan and George Clooney, with an unimaginably fluffy Saint Bernard puppy.

For the doc about the two Hollywood icons, Hawke enlisted an array of actors to read old journals and interviews, some of which come from a previously abandoned memoir that Newman commissioned from his friend, screenwriter Stewart Stern. These actors lend their voices to Newman, Woodard and their contemporaries like Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet and Gore Vidal. (In a heated auction in 2021, Knopf won the rights to publish the memoir.)

The first of the six chapters of The Last Movie Stars premieres at SXSW on March 14 before heading to CNN+ later this year. Ahead of its debut, Hawke talked to THR about the lasting appeal of Woodward and Newman and how his doc may fall under the category of “pandemic art.”

You likely had enough materials to do a straight biodoc. How did you land on the idea of using actors reading transcripts of the interviews to be the backing of the documentary?

I started realizing that you really can’t talk about Paul and Joanne without talking about their generation, in the culture and world that they were born into. And in the same way that they’re interconnected with their generation, I’m interconnected with mine. I thought it would be interesting for it to be one generation looking back on what happened before us. Why now? Why, in 2022, should you take time out of your life to think about Paul and Joanne? I thought it could make it contemporary and make it speak to not just reportage about, “this happened, that happened,” but to actually have a meditation on why [it] happened might be interesting or relevant to now.

The story is so big. A 50-year career is a lot. One of my favorite art documentaries is [Martin] Scorsese’s No Direction Home, and I realized as soon as I started working on this, why he contained that documentary. It didn’t try to be Bob Dylan’s whole life. It explored just a few years. If you want to make one substantive, meaningful documentary about Paul and Joanne and [it has] to be like two hours and change, I would have to pick a time period. But the family had really wanted me to tell their whole story. To have two 50-year careers that are so inspiring, but to also have that be inside a marriage, that really is unique.

In the first chapter, Paul Newman talks about his insecurities when it came to other performers, and he names people like John Malkovich and Jack Nicholson. How was it, as a performer yourself, to hear about Paul Newman openly voicing these insecurities?

I found it so thrilling that someone as iconic as Paul Newman would be insecure. It made him human for me. Every one of us goes through our life worrying that we’re not enough. You know? Once you realize that even he felt that way, you’re like: Oh OK, I don’t have to hate myself for my insecurities. Like, they’re just a part of living. When I read in his transcript that James Dean made him nervous, [I thought] of course he did! He’s James Dean! The whole thing becomes terribly human, and you’re like: Oh, Saint Matthew or whatever didn’t sprinkle fairy dust all over you and make you impervious. You just had to fight through it, like the rest of us. Yeah. I felt like that might be inspiring to other people. I love the moment when Paul says, “I knew when Ben Gazzara said I was fake that I was a Shaker Heights asshole.” I would have never thought that Paul Newman was made insecure by Ben Gazzara. But I guess if I was in an acting class with Ben Gazzara, I would’ve been.

How did you go about casting the actors who would voice the people in your documentary?

This documentary may — and this may be disparaging in the future or not — clearly fall into something that will be called “pandemic art.” I would’ve never been able to get this collection together if people weren’t still frozen at home and frozen in time. I just kind of followed my nose. I know Sam Rockwell, I’ve known him for years, since we were kids. He’s a fun person to talk to about why Cool Hand Luke is a great movie. And I’m doing all this stuff on a Elia Kaza and I thought, I should talk to Zoe. Bobby Cannavale, he’s so opinionated and thoughtful about his work and craft. I just decided to reach out to people that I thought might help me. It also just became really fun. It made the making of the documentary fun for me to be like: What does Clooney think about Paul Newman? Because when you think about it, Clooney’s one of the few people of my generation who have really been a cinema luminary and put themselves out there politically put themselves out there themselves socially. He is one of the handful of people on the planet that might know what Paul is thinking when he says this, that, or the other thing. Clooney’s had such a long career, himself. I have Laura Linney voicing Joanne Woodward, and Laura was one of Joanne’s pupils. It’s a way to make the documentary personal, not just for me, but for my generation.

What did you learn about yourself as a performer while making this?

As I’m speaking to you, I’m in a car headed toward the mix of chapter three, so I’m still working on this. I know that it affected me. I’ve dedicated my life to the same thing that they did, and it’s been a really interesting event in my life to be forced to study people who did it at an extremely high level for a very long time. To really see how they responded to success and how they responded to failure, both professional and personal failures, and how they kept marching. What’s inspiring about it is not the grand events of life, but more the [everyday life experiences] we all go through. How deeply involved they were in the civil rights movement, or how depressed they were when they felt it wasn’t achieving what they dreamed it was. Yeah. And how that depression turned into Newman’s Own and this huge act of charitable giving. Meaning, how failures can turn into successes and how if handled wrongly, successes turn into failures.

What do you hope for people who may be watching this outside of the entertainment industry? What do you hope they take away from Paul and Joanne’s story?

At my core, I’m an actor. A lot of people who are fans of the movie industry think that the profession of acting is like going from one red carpet to another. Paul and Joanne took the craft of acting so seriously and felt themselves as servants to this profession, and they really believed in storytelling. How making yourself vulnerable in front of others has a great value, not on an individual level, but on a whole community level. I hope they see them less as celebrities and more as artists and craftsmen.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.