Richard Linklater was really disappointed with 'Dazed and Confused', says Ethan Hawke

Actor Ethan Hawke has revealed that filmmaker Richard Linklater was unhappy with the gender imbalance in the stories of his cult classic "Dazed and Confused" and he tried to rectify it through their "Before" trilogy. The film, released in 1993, featured the likes of Ben Affleck, Milla Jovovich, Cole Hauser, Matthew McConaughey and others as a group of teenagers experiencing the last of their school lives.

Talking with Cameron Bailey, the artistic director of Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), via video conference, Hawke said Linklater was "disappointed" with "Dazed and Confused" as he believed that the film's stories about men were written better than those about women characters, reported IndieWire.

"He was really disappointed in himself with how much better he did with the men than the women. The feeling he had ultimately when he was finished with the movie was that it was a boy movie. Its focus was on the male characters. It didn't achieve the Chekhovian goal of being genderless, and his goal for 'Before Sunrise' was to invite a very strong woman and get two actors, male and female, and have them create their characters together," the actor said.

The "Before" trilogy started with 1995's "Before Sunrise", featuring Julie Delpy and Hawke as two strangers Celine and Jesse, who decide to spend some time with each other in the Austrian city of Vienna. The movie was followed by sequels -- "Before Sunset" (2004) and "Before Midnight" (2013), which took the stories of the pair forward. Both the films were equally lauded by the critics for the story and performances of the two leads.

Hawke also recalled the story of how Linklater pitched the first film to him and how he felt that it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

He said the director told him, "I don't want you to worry too much about the script. I'm inviting you to be a filmmaker with me. My whole life I've gone to the movies and there's espionage and shootouts and helicopters, all this action. Everything that I see is all this drama, (so much so) that you would think my life, our lives, have no drama. That's not the way I feel.

"My life feels very exciting to me and I've never been involved in a chase or a gun shootout. My life is exciting to me. And what's the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me? Connecting with another human beingIf we can put that on screen I think people will care," Hawke said.