This article originally appeared in the September 2018 issue with the headline “The Making of Blaze.”

When singer-songwriter Blaze Foley was murdered at the age of 39, in February 1989, he had released only one single and an LP that he’d mostly distributed himself. He had spent much of the previous two decades in obscurity, making the rounds at clubs in Austin and Houston, crooning his introspective folk-country stunners, which melded starry-eyed romance and critical self-reflection. To many who knew him, he was an eccentric backwoods sage. He was dubbed the Duct Tape Messiah after he began binding his tattered boots and clothing with adhesive to mock the shiny attire worn by urban cowboys. Townes Van Zandt once described him as “one of the most spiritual cats I’ve ever met: an ace picker; a writer who never shirks the truth; never fails to rhyme; and one of the flashiest wits I’ve ever had to put up with.” Foley was also an infamous drunk who was prone to self-sabotage. He died virtually penniless. Yet since his death, he has become something of a folk hero. Beginning in the late nineties, several previously unreleased albums were made available to fans. John Prine, a hero of Foley’s, covered one of his songs, the elegantly observant “Clay Pigeons,” on his Grammy Award–winning 2005 album Fair & Square. The documentary Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah was released in 2011. And this month marks the debut of an Ethan Hawke–directed biopic, Blaze. The Austin-born Hawke was attracted to Foley’s story precisely because it disrupts typical Hollywood narratives. “One of the things I don’t like about most music movies is that they’re always about somebody famous, as if famous people are the only people who have interesting stories to tell,” Hawke says. “I spent my life in the arts, and almost all of the interesting people I’ve met, the most talented people, have faced just utter indifference. I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to make a music picture that doesn’t have the scene where the guy makes it?” There were moments when Foley flirted with a breakthrough. In 1980 he landed a coveted spot opening for Kinky Friedman at New York City’s famed Lone Star Cafe but was subsequently excoriated by the headliner for his drunken performance. Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard cut a version of Foley’s “If I Could Only Fly” for their 1987 duet album Seashores of Old Mexico. Haggard, who had likely never heard of Foley before that recording, released a solo version of the song in 2000, making it the title track of his fiftieth album. Foley, of course, was long gone by then. Toward the end of his life, Foley befriended an older man named Concho January. Foley had multiple—at times violent—scuffles with Concho’s son, Carey, over what Foley perceived to be an abusive father-son relationship. It came to a head when Carey shot and killed Foley at Concho’s home in South Austin. According to playwright and author Sybil Rosen’s 2008 memoir, Living in the Woods in a Tree, the lyrics to “If I Could Only Fly” were affixed to his casket. As he was lowered into the ground in Austin, mourners threw Bibles, picks, and capos into the grave, covering a casket sealed by his friends in layers of silver duct tape. Hawke based the film on the book by Rosen, whom some knew as Foley’s wife, though they were never legally married. She met the man she called Depty Dawg (he had already shed his birth name, Michael David Fuller, but had not yet adopted Blaze Foley) in 1975, while she was working as an actor at an artists’ colony in Georgia. Foley, who grew up in both Georgia and Texas, had signed on to play in the house band and help with occasional carpentry projects. Days after meeting, the couple began a whirlwind romance and moved into a tree house tucked into the woods, where their landlord allowed them to live rent-free. There, they spent the next year honing their respective crafts. Though their relationship lasted only two years, the couple bouncing between Georgia and Austin and Chicago all the while, it was the most fertile creative period of Foley’s life. And Rosen was his greatest muse. Hawke pulled some of the film’s most striking dialogue almost directly from Rosen’s book. In one scene, Rosen, played by Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat, and Foley, by musician Ben Dickey, are curled up in the back of a pickup heading down a tree-lined country road. “So are you going to be a big country star, like Roger Miller?” she asks. Blaze, laughing, replies, “I don’t want to be a star. I want to be a legend.” Before they began filming, Hawke asked Rosen, who co-wrote and acts in the film, to keep a diary of her experience on set, a selection of which we have published here. —Abby Johnston

Foley (Dickey) and Rosen (Shawkat) at their “wedding ceremony,” in Blaze. Courtesy of IFC Films

November 28, 2016 Village Studios Jackson, Louisiana Forty-one years ago, I described living in a tree house with Blaze Foley as being like falling out of a dream. This afternoon, landing in the parking lot of the film studio where much of Blaze will be shot, I feel the way I did at 25—as if I’ve been dropped into a mysterious world without quite knowing how I got here. At 2 p.m. Village Studios is muggy and quiet as naptime at summer camp. It does seem like a village: picket fences border a row of modest, popsicle-colored town houses; an old caboose is parked incongruously, like an immovable red bull; and directly in front of me are two quasi-antebellum houses with broad verandas, one oval-shaped with a riverboat bow. The Long, Hot Summer was filmed here. Village Studios lore maintains that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward met on these jasmine-scented porches. All at once, Ryan Hawke, a producer on the movie and Ethan’s wife, races out of one of the houses and hugs me. “A person, a real person!” she cries, meaning me. I suppose it must be odd to know someone mostly as a character in a movie script and then have them pop up in the flesh a week before filming begins. It feels a bit odd to me too. Ryan and I met once before, six months ago in New York City, when she and Ethan and I had dinner together. We were all nervous, but we wanted the same thing: to make a loving movie about Blaze and his music. Collectively, the three of us are like a couple who get pregnant on the first date. You don’t really know each other, but you’re suddenly committed to bringing this baby into the world. Ben Dickey, who will play Blaze, appears—it’s the first time we’ve seen each other. I am stunned by his size—towering like Blaze—and charmed by his Huck Finn smile. His hug is huge, warm, engulfing, and shockingly familiar. Our emails back and forth over the past month have woven us into a kind of karmic cloth that binds us through Blaze. Writing three, four times a day, we grappled with Blaze’s myth and how it differed (or not) from the man I knew. Mostly, we talked about love—sexual love, true love, the kind of love Blaze felt for the suffering world. We wrote about tree houses and songwriting and where inspiration comes from. I saw so much of Blaze naturally occurring in Ben, who is a musician himself—his artistry, his sensitivity, and his struggle—I knew he had only to open himself to the story to make Blaze come alive once more. There’s no small talk; there isn’t time. The film has come together so quickly. Ethan and I first talked in April, and now it’s November, with only seven days before shooting begins. We turn into the art department, which is housed on the first floor of the boatlike house. The large room, lined with desks, is basically a Blaze museum. He covers the walls. There are tree house pictures, snapshots of my late parents (which I find bizarre, like they’re still watching me), and an array of images from Blaze’s other lives. He lived a lot of them in one. I meet art director Elissabeth Blofson and production designer Thomas Hayek. Within minutes, I am showing them Blaze mementos: a stack of love letters; the 1979 45 rpm single of “If I Could Only Fly” inscribed to me; the ponytail he cut off and gave me when we broke up in Chicago. Thomas’s wide grin fades; he begins to cry. Ben, Elissabeth, and Thomas take me to see the tree house and the sets for our Austin and Chicago apartments. It’s intoxicating and vaguely disorienting to see the places Blaze and I lived filtered through others’ vision. The awareness that, for the next five weeks, the only firm ground beneath my feet will be the unrelentingly surreal nature of this experience slowly begins to wash over me. Later, at night, I meet Alia, who plays me, still a strange thing to write. Small, dark, and curly-haired, she gasps when she sees me and rushes into my arms, like a living mirror image or a dream of someone I used to be.

Foley perched on the hood of a car in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Roger Dukes/Courtesy of Sybil Rosen