Ethan Hawke and his daughter Maya Hawke have a running joke about their Flannery O’Connor movie.

“Wildcat,” which Ethan directed and Maya stars in as O’Connor, was made with complete sincerity. It’s a deeply creative investigation into the Southern Catholic novelist and short story writer behind “A Good Man is Hard to Find” that dips in and out of both her imagination and her real life.

O’Connor died at age 39, in 1964, of lupus. She won the National Book Award posthumously, in 1972. Though celebrated for her prose and sharp social satire, in recent years she’s also come under scrutiny for racism in private correspondence and her treatment of race in her works. It was territory that was both thorny and rich with possibility. But the Hawkes can’t help but laugh about it too, imagining the pitch to a major studio or streamer.

Here’s how it might go: