Film a slow evolution
U.S. director Debra Granik has an odd sort of fame. Although her second film, Winter’s Bone (2010), was Oscar-nominated for the screenplay she co-wrote and for best picture of the year, it’s perhaps more widely remembered as the film that made a star of Jennifer Lawrence.
So when Granik’s newest film, Leave No Trace, featured a powerful performance from another relative unknown, Thomasin McKenzie of Wellington, New Zealand, critics wondered if lightning will strike again.
Granik’s praise for her star is reserved but precise as the two sit down with the press at May’s Cannes Film Festival, where Leave No Trace screened as part of the Directors’ Fortnight after premièring at Sundance in January.
“Thomasin has a very deep well of desire to explore and to learn,” she says. “And she’s not a jaded individual; her future will be to take roles that she can get involved with, and stories that she likes. I believe she’ll be very choosy about projects because she wants to put her heart in it. I don’t see Thomasin as someone who’s gong to call it in.”
Leave No Trace tells the story of a veteran suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (played by Ben Foster) and living in the woods near Portland, Ore., with his teenage daughter, Tom (McKenzie). When a mistake puts an end to their chosen lifestyle, the two must try to fit into society again.
Granik does not work quickly; Leave No Trace is only her fourth film since Down to the Bone in 2004, and including the 2014 documentary Stray Dog. Instead, she works hard to observe and learn about the type of story she wants to tell, and many of the details have the ring of truth to them. Or they’re just straight-up true, like the scene in the movie when a young man talks about building a tiny house that he can afford.
“You’re always curious about that whom you know the least,” she explains. “I’m born into this female body and so who do I sometimes not understand? Men.”
In particular, the combat vet played by Foster. So she talked to real men who had lived that life, looking for what she calls “the ands,” those extra details about people.
“Could you tell me a little of what it’s like to be you?” she remembers asking. “Could I observe a whole lot of things about you, and find all the ands? I’ve been shown one version for a lot of decades about men on screen and how they behave in relationships and family, and I’m looking for the ‘and.’ OK ... and you happen to bake cakes with power tools. I’m interested in that. Whatever it is, it’s curiosity of the other. If I don’t know what it’s like to be you, I would love to have the chance to ask and try to observe and show some other things that I didn’t see before.”
McKenzie learned a lot during the shoot as well, with fiction sometimes bleeding into reality. For instance, we see Tom talking to a bee-keeper and eventually holding some bees in her hand.
“That bee-keeper, who is a real bee-keeper in the Pacific Northwest, vetted Tom and said ... you are calm enough to hold bees,” Granik recalls. “We called your parents. We stopped viewing it as a stunt, and viewed it as something that you were drawn to do.”
McKenzie picks up the thread. “And I wanted to do it really badly. It was the most incredible experience of my life, standing in front of a beehive and smelling the honey, and feeling the vibration and the warmth, and watching them work together and communicate with each other. It was, like, hypnotizing.”