Ethan Hawke Shares Important Lesson He Learned From Robin Williams On Set Of 'Dead Poets Society'

Actor Ethan Hawke has become a Hollywood legend in his own right, but his career started with being a child actor learning from the greats, like Robin Williams.

The two co-starred in Dead Poets Society, one of the greatest films of the 1980s. It was a breakout role for Hawke and one that solidified Williams as a dramatic actor after a career mostly focused on comedy.

In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Hawke described how he got to see exactly why Williams was so adept at spanning those two genres, and that it changed his own acting forever.

Hawke told the magazine that Williams leveraged his skills in comedic improvisation to make his performance as John Keating all the more vivid, something Hawke learned to adapt into his own performances.

Hawke told Vanity Fair:

"Robin Williams didn't do the script, and I didn't know you could do that."

"If he had an idea, he just did it. He didn't ask permission. And that was a new door that was opened to my brain, that you could play like that."

Hawke went on to explain that director Peter Weir ended up letting Williams go with his improvisations, even though he was not used to working that way, because of the way it honed the performance.

He explained:

"Peter liked it, as long as we still achieved the same goals that the script had."

"They had a very different way of working, but they didn't judge one another or resist one another. They worked with each other. That's exciting."

"That’s when you get at the stuff of what great collaboration can do. You don’t have to be the same — you don’t have to hate somebody for being different than you are."

"And then the collective imagination can become very, very powerful, because the movie becomes bigger that one person’s point of view. it’s containing multiple perspectives."

You could certainly say that's exactly what happened in Dead Poets Society, a film that has made an indelible mark on generations of people despite never being any kind of blockbuster.

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Hawke said that watching Weir and Williams' collaboration was a huge learning experience as well.

"[Weir] thought about making movies with real discipline."

"And I'm watching him direct Robin Williams — not an easy thing to do, because Robin was a comic genius, but dramatic acting was still new to Robin at that time."

"Watching that relationship in the room — I was four feet away while they were talking about performance — that was something you don't unsee."

On social media, fans of both actors were fascinated and touched by Hawke's tribute to Williams.

Hawke would go on to become perhaps best known for his work with director Richard Linklater in the Before Sunrise trilogy and, later, Boyhood, films that are all often assumed to be improvised because of the natural way the performances unfold.

But Linklater has confirmed many times that he doesn't allow improvisation on set, which is a testament to Linklater's writing and directing as well as Hawke's acting.

Knowing how much he learned about improvisation from Williams on the Dead Poets Society set, it's easy to see Williams' mark on some of Hawke's own iconic performances.

Yet another item to add to Robin Williams' long list of legacies during his legendary career.