Cannes - Hope is a lie that renders people passive and incapable of changing the world, US film star Ethan Hawke said Friday in Cannes, where he appeared for the presentation of Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation.
Asked why the movie, which is a graphic expose of the American fast food industry, does not have a heroic or happy ending, Hawke said it was because that would have provided hope.
'Hope is a great pacifier. It is a lie,' the star of Training Day said. 'Righteous anger can fuel change. Hope generates only apathy. Many people sit around and hope. And that is why there's so much apathy in the world.'
In Fast Food Nation, which is vying for the Palme d'Or for best film of the 2006 Cannes film festival, Hawke plays an inconoclastic character named Uncle Pete who advises his niece to change the world, because 'making a revolution is for the young.'
Fast Food Nation, which also features Bruce Willis and Patricia Arquette, is based on the ground-breaking 2001 book of the same title by Eric Schlosser, who also helped write the script.
The book exposed the often immoral and unsanitary practices of the American fast food industry, and was an instant best-seller when it appeared. The film is a dramatization, in a fictional fast food chain named Mickey's, of the book's revelations.
According to director Linklater, fast food companies are already gearing up to counter the film when it hits the screens in the United States.
'They've hired some (advertising) agencies to act when the movie comes out,' he told journalists in Cannes. 'I've never had a film that actually threatened someone's bottom line.'
© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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