“Wildcat” is Ethan Hawke’s ambitious, loving look at the celebrated Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor, whose life, books and journals are the base for his cinematic portrait.

O’Connor, just 39 when she died in 1964, is best known for the novel “Wise Blood” (filmed by John Huston) and her short story collections, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”

What’s surprising is that the impetus for “Wildcat” came from Hawke’s daughter Maya, a “bankable” name since starring in the “Stranger Things” franchise.

“My mother first gave me Flannery’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ when I was 15 because she was trying to inspire the inner feminist in me,” Hawke, 53, joked in a Zoom interview.

“Maya discovered her in high school and got obsessed with her writing, which became a meeting place for Maya and I. We found her really interesting to discuss.

“When ‘Stranger Things’ blew up and she was starting to look into developing her own material, she was, ‘I really want to play this character’ and came at me with this idea of making this movie.

“I love her acting. She’s so intense. And Maya is a writer herself — she writes her music and she’s been a poet since she was a kid. And I just wanted to channel her passion for this woman.”

O’Connor, he noted in a Zoom interview, “was a really prickly young woman.  Maya wanted to make a movie about a young woman whose primary relationship was to herself and her work and her faith.  And not about a boy or getting married. She wanted to see a movie like that. And I loved that idea.

“As I was going to make a movie about O’Connor, I read the whole canon and that’s when the idea of this movie came to me, the idea of just centering it around Flannery and her stories.

“I mean, it was kind of obvious to be honest. It doesn’t take a genius to see Maya’s 24 and at 24 years old Flannery was diagnosed with lupus and thought she was going to die. It was like, ‘Well, that’s perfect. We’re going to center it around them.’

We see Laura Linney, who plays Flannery’s mother, morph into various characters in O’Connor’s stories.

“But this woman had very little drama in her life,” Hawke continued, “and I was really interested in making a movie about, Is human creativity an act of worship?  Are our imagination and reality connected? In what ways are they connected? Could I make a film about that?

“Because Flannery’s life seemed like the perfect opportunity to cinematically express that conversation.”

“Wildcat” opens May 3.