'I think that something really good can come from trying to exorcise some of your own personal demons in your work," says Ethan Hawke, sipping from a steaming bowl of pumpkin soup. We are sitting in the window of a cafe just around the corner from Hawke's apartment in Chelsea, New York, talking about his new film, The Woman in the Fifth, a small French-British co-production, directed by Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski. Hawke plays an American writer in Paris, newly divorced, seeking custody of his daughter, who is drawn into a phantasmal relationship with a beautiful muse (Kristin Scott Thomas). The character seems like a napkin sketch of Hawke himself.

"In many ways it is," he says. "That jacket he wears – I had this blazer that's a littletoo small, like it's left over from prep school. The costume designer and I saw it as an extension of the character from Dead Poets Society: you know, his eyes have gone bad, he used to be quite promising but promising doesn't cut it at 40. He's turning in on himself. Pawel had this idea that depression is someone who can't see outside of themselves."

A paranoia piece in the vein of early Roman Polanski (Hawke calls it "an art film from 1962"), the film feels like Hawke's most thorough exploration yet of the darker claret running through his own strain of romanticism. It's been there from the beginning of his career, when, as he puts it, "the pure-bred romanticism of Dead Poets Society kind of injected itself into