CALL OF THE WILD
When Robin Wright chose to make an off-grid survival story, she didn’t expect challenges such as last-minute self-casting, extreme weather and a hungry, uninvited bear. She tells Total Film how her feature directorial debut, LAND, wasn’t a walk in the park…
Every morning in the car on the way to work on Netflix show House Of Cards, Robin Wright would listen to the news. And it was rarely the type of news you want to hear. “About three years ago, in our country, we were experiencing, almost biweekly, these random shootings,” she recalls of the time. “I just was waking up every day and listening to the horrible news and I just couldn’t get that question out of my mind: how do [the families of the victims] find their way? How do they get through that time of grief, when everything you have known, that existence that you have had, will never be the same again?”
Those queries were sitting in her head as she looked for a feature film script to direct, having helmed episodes of House Of Cards from Season 2 to 6, when Jesse Chatham’s screenplay passed across her desk. The story of Edee – a Chicago woman ripped apart by the loss of her family who tries to find some sort of physical and emotional anchor in living alone, humbly, in a no-power/water/phone cabin in the Wyoming wilderness – seemed to offer a balm of fortitude in a time of social and political unrest. “This script kind of spoke to the hope and resilience of human beings, and that we need each other to get through difficult times,” Wright nods, pulling a black scarf a little tighter round her neck. “And then to release the movie after this long year we’ve endured, I thought: how empowering to have that message come up now...”
Along with hope and resilience, kindness is also a major takeaway in Wright’s film – epitomised by Demián Bichir’s Miguel, a man who discovers Edee at a metaphysical crossroads and offers life-saving support, no questions asked. Wright’s other film out during Covid (though at the other end of the budget spectrum), Wonder Woman 1984, sent the same vibes out into the universe; the need for people to work together with empathy. Wonder Woman’s aunt and badass general of Themyscira concurs. “I love that part of humanity. Because we are that way. There are some assholes, but I think, intrinsically, we’re all just people being good. It’s why we all wanted to make this movie. Miguel’s line is the pinnacle of that beautiful simplicity. Edee says, ‘Why are you helping me?’ And he says, ‘Because you’re in my path…’”
There were plenty of obstacles in Wright’s path to get her film made. Three years ago, when she was at the Cannes Film Festival as director/exec producer “doing the dog-and-pony show, pitching your project, 15 meetings in one day” to get financing, this wasn’t a story that was being snapped up. “Nobody wanted to pick us up. Nobody really connected with the content. I’m not saying it was because it was a women’s story versus not. Maybe it was, but no one was biting.” Rather like for Edee herself, hope arrived when it seemed all was lost. In her last meeting of the fest, Wright met with Focus Features and secured her budget. Inspired by movies such as Jeremiah Johnson, Never Cry Wolf and The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, she knew her film would be sparse on dialogue and big on interior emotional life and visceral outdoor locations.
Though she’d snagged a budget, cash was tight so she took the tax breaks Canada offered to shoot in Calgary rather than on location in Wyoming, and condensed filming to an intense 30-day window where numerous years and every season would need to be captured. A tall order for a film crew, but also, as it turned out, for a lead. Though Wright approached a number of actors to take on the role of Edee, none worked out due to family or work commitments. As the start of production crept closer, Wright followed the adage of, ‘If you want something doing, do it yourself.’
“The clock was ticking,” she shrugs. “[Producer] Allyn [Stewart] and I were sitting at lunch one day and I said, half-jokingly, ‘Why don’t I just do it? I mean, I’m going to be on set anyway.’” Though directing and starring wasn’t foreign to her after House Of Cards, Mother Nature was an unknowable factor. “It didn’t feel like a major adjustment,” she says when considering the jump from TV episodes to features. “The biggest shift was that we were literally shooting in the wilderness, not on a stage. And it was really nice to get out of Louboutins for a minute and just put on hiking boots!”
She’d need those hiking boots. Production designer Trevor Smith scouted a remote spot on Moose Mountain near Banff National Park and built Edee’s cabin from scratch in a Calgary carpark before dismantling it and carrying it, piecemeal, 7,000 feet up the mountain. “I was like, ‘Let’s take the risk, because we need it to feel authentic every time that door opens,’” Wright reasons. “You want to feel the cold. You want to feel the wind. And you’d never get that with green screen on a stage.”
Everything for the shoot had to be hiked in and out, with Wright and her crew living in trailers on location in order to save commuting time and to be available to catch serendipitous natural moments, like a flock of geese flying overhead or a beautiful change in weather conditions. Though she didn’t sleep in the actual cabin like her dedicated director of photography, Bobby Bukowski (who befriended a squirrel that snoozed in his sleeping bag with him), this was roughing it. September weather meant “four seasons in one day” and Wright often had to change shooting plans on the hoof to accommodate a spot of spring-like sunshine or a howling winter gale.
“All of us were definitely feeling the challenge of the weather, because it did dictate, every day, what and when we could shoot certain scenes. And we had to basically bow to it,” she laughs. “It’s so unpredictable up there in Calgary, and they prepared us for that. They just said, ‘Have all your costumes ready, and all your changes ready, because you may have to flip from summer to winter in a matter of 30 minutes.’ And we did that.”
No stranger to camping (“My dad always had a camper trailer. Every summer it was travelling, camping, exploring… Arizona, Utah, Northern California, Yosemite, Yellowstone. And it is very healing”), Wright still had to push herself while wearing numerous vocational hats. Though she had a stunt double she still had to jump in treacherously cold currents for a scene where Edee is literally swept away by nature. “I don’t
“THE BIGGEST SHIFT WAS THAT WE WERE LITERALLY SHOOTING IN THE WILDERNESS, NOT ON A STAGE" ROBIN WRIGHT
think I’ve ever been in water that cold,” she remembers, getting up to turn the A/C off in her house as she shivers. “The stunt girl did eight takes in a wetsuit, they had to pull her out, she almost had hypothermia and we didn’t get the shot. So I had to get in, and I did two takes. I can’t believe she did eight of them!” Ever the perfectionist, the director in her is still not happy with the shot. “I’ll always be like, ‘Ugh, I never got the coverage I wanted from that river sequence.’”
She and Bichir also had to learn the bushcraft that sustains Edee as they filmed. “Demián and I had quick courses for all of the tasks before shooting. As the scenes would come up, the day before, at lunch while the camera was setting up, [on-set experts would] say, ‘Hey, come over here! We’re going to teach you how to set a snare. We’re going to teach you how to skin a deer. We’re going to teach you how to smoke the meat, and how to fillet the meat.’”
Meat proved the cause of one hairy incident. Though the script called for a trained bear to be on set for a scene when Edee is trapped in her outhouse by an ursine visitor, the wilderness once again provided a rug pull. “We had a wild black bear show up on the set – he got hold of a hamburger at the craft-service table [food for the crew] and he came back every single day. We had our bear whisperer and everybody would have to get up on the deck of the cabin and be really still, until he ran the bear off. But we couldn’t have the trained bear come to set, because it was too dangerous for him to be around the wild bear. Yogi Bear, yeah, he did not want to go home! He loved the craft service. One day he opened the trailer door to craft services at 4.30am, and the craft-service woman was inside. She took a cask iron skillet and a stainless steel spoon, and just started banging the hell out it, and yelling at the top of her lungs. So I guess that works, is my point. You just scream bloody murder!”
The sort of shoot then that other wilderness productions have been well-documented as being miserable experiences. But when Total Film talked to Bichir recently, he recalled how many directors try to establish respect by behaving like “assholes”, but that Wright “conducted the operation with grace, with kindness and with extreme precision”. She laughs. “Demián and I talked about this when we first met, actually. I don’t want to be on a set where the energy is negative, tense, full of rage and people yelling. I’ve never liked it. I’ve been in this business for 47 years, and I don’t think it’s productive, you know? And he agreed. I was like, ‘Let’s just be kind, and have a nice tempo on the set.’ You get so much more done.”
Coming in on budget and on time, Land debuted at Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and now chimes with another story of a woman’s experience finding nourishment in nature and solitude in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, which also probes the need for human kindness. “Does it resonate even more now?” Wright muses of the subject matter and the strides made in female representation in film. “I think so. And we’ve got this platform, these female stories – look at this year. There’s a plethora of them. It’s very exciting. It just feels like a moment where we can all just exhale a little bit, like, ‘God, it’s been a long wait.’” She pushes her clear-rimmed glasses up her nose and smiles. “I think the glass ceiling – the crack is getting bigger. We just have to keep pushing.”
LAND OPENS ON 4 JUNE.