Grunt work
‘Sasquatch Sunset’ stars suit up, dive deep
For Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg, “Sasquatch Sunset” is a movie that came with an unusual directive: Get in touch with your inner Chewbacca.
In this one-of-akind immersion in the life of a mini tribe of Sasquatch roaming, sleeping, living in the Pacific Northwest redwoods forest, neither actor is visible under the elaborately constructed suit and no one has anything to say beyond a variety of grunts.
Why, you ask, would an actor whose life has been spent achieving recognition want to suddenly be invisible?
“I like the part of not getting recognized. I find that I don’t actually like attention on myself,” Keough, 34, said with a laugh in a joint phone interview with Eisenberg. “So I think that I prefer that the more I get to play characters the more I have fun, personally.”
“I think a lot of actors, you become an actor because it fulfills or alleviates some discomfort you have as a person,” Eisenberg, 40, added. “This is the ultimate version of what we’re probably trying to do anyway: Becoming invisible.”
It wasn’t easy. The Zellner brothers, David and Nathan, co-directed while David scripted the grunts and daily events. Nathan co-stars as the tiny tribe’s dominant male.
The cast began with movement study in what’s been called Ape Camp. “Before we went up to the location or we met any of the other actors we did Zoom classes with this amazing movement coach Lorin Eric Salm who used videos and collective contributions to figure out our walk and maybe the vocabulary that we would use, which is different grunts and noises for different reasons,” Eisenberg said.
“Then, when we got together, it turned into something else and we were using the costumes.”
The full body suits, Keough said, “were extremely difficult for me personally. It was really hard — your whole face is covered. You can’t itch yourself. You can’t touch your face. There’s a bit of claustrophobia. It’s also really tight and hard to move in. Like walking and moving your arms, everything’s difficult.
“Something that feels like it should be very simple, like walking across the field, is extremely exhausting.”
“Absolutely! It was more physically taxing than anything I’ve ever experienced,” Eisenberg allowed. “In order for the suits and makeup to look right it has to be fitted to every muscle in your face. There are so many more muscles in your face that you don’t really think about until you have glue on every single one of them. And there’s hair coming off the glue.
“So as taxing as it was to wear, it’s as beautiful as it is.”
“Sasquatch Sunset” opens April 19