http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/27/arts/ethan-hawke-films-seymour-an-introduction.html 2014-09-27 00:52:13 Ethan Hawke Films ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ After meeting Seymour Bernstein, a concert pianist who became a teacher, Ethan Hawke thought someone should make a documentary about him. So he did. === Lana Turner It began a few years ago with an invitation to dinner: One of Mr. Bernstein’s piano pupils asked him to come to a dinner party, and mentioned that “I said, ‘Who is coming for dinner?’ ” Mr. Bernstein recalled this week in an interview. “I didn’t know who Ethan Hawke was. Of course, I Googled him immediately, and I almost gasped, because I had seen ‘Dead Poets Society’ and other movies he was in.” Mr. Hawke and This made a big impression on Mr. Hawke. “I met Seymour and I came home and said: ‘Somebody needs to make a documentary about this guy. Who could do it?’ ” he recalled at a recent discussion at Lincoln Center, adding that his wife, Ryan, pointed out the obvious candidate for the job. “She was the one who said, ‘Look, why don’t you just do it?’ ” Now, after more than two years of sporadic filming, Mr. Hawke’s portrait of Mr. Bernstein, “Seymour: An Introduction,” has been getting good reviews at film festivals, and will be shown on Saturday and Monday at The film has opened an unexpected new chapter in the life of Mr. Bernstein, who lives in a studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he gives piano lessons and sleeps on a pullout couch. Thirty-seven years after he decided to stop courting the limelight as a performer, he has found himself the toast of film festivals in Telluride, Toronto and now New York, where he shares the stage with Mr. Hawke at news conferences and public forums that are part buddy acts and part earnest discussions of life and art. At a discussion this month after a press screening at Lincoln Center, Mr. Bernstein recalled the dinner party that started the ball rolling, when Mr. Hawke had confessed that he had been experiencing stage fright. “And I said to him, very boldly, ‘What form does it take?’ ” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “And he said, ‘I have the feeling that I’m going to stop talking.’ ” Mr. Bernstein recounted telling Mr. Hawke a story he had heard about Michael Rabin, the violin virtuoso. Rabin had a phobia that he would drop his bow, Mr. Bernstein said, which he conquered by dropping it on purpose at one performance. He said that the anecdote inspired Mr. Hawke to try a similar approach: He stopped talking at a performance, let out a scream and then continued — with the audience apparently believing it was all part of the play. Mr. Hawke said that he had been drawn to the master-pupil aspect of serious piano lessons, and that he had been inspired by Mr. Bernstein’s insistence that performers have a right — even a responsibility — to be nervous, which they must overcome by preparing so thoroughly that they will do well in spite of it. Mr. Bernstein said he had wrestled with nerves during his performing career but had learned to cope by the time he walked away from it all in 1977, after playing a concert that he had decided, without telling anyone, would be his farewell. (A Times Mr. Bernstein mused, “I’m not sure that a major career is a healthy thing,” lamenting that the days of virtuosos who were also composers seemed a thing of the past. “I don’t think it’s very healthy to go careening around the world, playing the same pieces over and over again, and not developing other parts of you — especially your creative side.” When he stopped performing, he said, he composed his own music, wrote books and devoted himself to teaching his advanced students. “It was the happiest time of my life,” he said, adding that he still has a passion for teaching, and typically gives three or four hour-and-a-half lessons a day, as well as offering master classes. “I don’t know how to give an hour lesson,” he said. Mr. Bernstein is enjoying his new role as an unexpected movie star, and described the first time he saw the film — when Mr. Hawke warned that he might hate seeing himself on screen for the first time, and urged him to take friends. So Mr. Bernstein invited a few friends, including Michael Kimmelman, the chief architecture critic for The New York Times, who had “We came to this tiny little screening room, with the most comfortable chairs I’ve ever sat in,” Mr. Bernstein said. “And Ethan kept saying, ‘Seymour, be patient — you’re going to dislike it when you see it, but give it a chance.’ Well, it started, and with the very first scene, I burst into tears — you can tell I cry a little too easily — and I said, ‘Ethan, my God, that’s fantastic.’ ”