By James Mottram & Jeremy Nigro
2015’s The Sea Of Trees gave very little indication that it was destined to be one of the most poorly reviewed films of last year. With the experienced Gus Van Sant in the director’s chair, Matthew McConaughey in the lead role (fresh from his Best Actor Oscar and Golden Globe awards for Dallas Buyers Club) and a very capable cast including Naomi Watts and Ken Watanabe, the right people certainly seemed to be involved. Japan’s infamous Aokigahara Forest – one of the world’s most notorious “suicide spots” – appeared to be an interesting and unexplored setting for a film, and was mostly unknown to those not versed in creepy stuff on the internet. Its story about a suicidal American man (McConaughey) who travels there to find the “perfect place to die” is bleak but not without a potential for poetry. So how did the film end up being labelled a “baffling exercise in naval gazing” by FilmInk’s very own review? Our review is actually tame in comparison with some of the other savaging that Van Sant’s film has experienced. It all started at The 2015 Cannes Film Festival, where The Sea Of Trees was met by a mixture of loud boos and laughter from the audience. McConaughey, however, took it all in his famously laidback stride, and refused to be baited at Cannes. “Anyone has as much right to either boo as they do to ovate,” he drawled in an interview after the screening. Tellingly, Van Sant had previously won the Palme d’Or at the festival for his 2003 effort, Elephant, proving that reputations mean nothing at Cannes. The Sea Of Trees currently holds a score of 23 on review aggregate site Metacritic and an 8% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Here are excerpts from the interviews that FilmInk conducted with Naomi Watts and Gus Van Sant after the film’s Cannes premiere…maybe you can figure out where it all went wrong.
The movie consists of two parts: Matthew in the forest, and flashbacks to what has led him there, where you play his wife. Did you appreciate both stories? Naomi Watts: “Yeah, they’re very connected and dependent on one another. There are three important themes in this movie, and they are constant themes in all storytelling. Life, death, and love: we can all relate to those themes, because they are things that we are going to come up against at some point.”
Did it feel alienating to not be part of the bulk of the movie that took place in the forest? Naomi Watts: “Well, no. It’s always scary when you come into a film late and it’s been shooting for several weeks, or before you get there. It’s like coming to a new school, which I’ve done, many times. It’s not easy. You think, ‘How do I reshape myself to fit in?’ Or ‘How do I stay myself?’ So, in that regard, it was scary, and I knew that Matthew and I were not going to get any rehearsal time.”
Gus Van Sant seems like the gentlest of souls. How is he on the set? Naomi Watts: “Same! Completely! Very subdued, very mild, meek. That feels like a pejorative word, but I just found him so completely lovely. He’s really kind, and really open to your ideas, but at the same time, he has a very strong vision. He doesn’t talk a huge amount, but you can tell when he gets a little excited, but again, it’s in a very mild way. He’s not walking around the room remonstrating. When directors don’t have extreme passions, it’s harder to read. But I got to know him quickly.”
What was the biggest reason for accepting this role? Naomi Watts: “It started with Gus. I’ve been really lucky with the directors that I’ve worked with. I’m always looking to continue that. Film is a director’s medium, and if you trust the director, you can give yourself over to them. Great filmmakers are our teachers. Right away, I was like, ‘Oh, he’s doing a project, and there’s a female part’, and Matthew McConaughey was attached, and then I read the script later on, and I just thought, ‘Yeah! It’s a stormy relationship…power struggle, high drama, high tension, resentment, and love…so many things.’ It felt very reminiscent of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf…that sort of messy love story.”
What is your view of Aokigahara Forest? Gus Van Sant: “I went to the real place. It’s at the base of Mount Fuji, which is really nice. It’s very beautiful, and it seems like an ordinary forest. It doesn’t seem particularly spiritual. The spirituality comes from you reading into it, more than it existing already in the woods. My interpretation of forests is that they’re not embodiments of spirits. It’s just me; maybe if I was a different person, I’d see all the spirituality within the forest, but I didn’t see it. It had a lot of tourist places…there were ice cream shops.”
Matthew’s in such a such a great spot in his career at the moment. Did his attachment virtually greenlight the project on its own? Gus Van Sant: “Yes, it was nice to have his help to get the money. The distributor always wants a good lead. It’s not necessarily a requirement, but it can be a desire. When they made Life Of Pi, for instance, there weren’t any particularly illustrious leads, but it was like a $100 million film. In our case, there were a lot of big actors who would fit into the parts, and Matthew was just about to win the Oscar. It helps.”
When you are making something, are you aware of what might be a “critics’ film” and what might be more mainstream? Gus Van Sant: “Yes, I’ve had both good and bad criticisms of all my films. So you can count them up, and sometimes some films get more good reviews than bad. With all my festival films, there have been pretty bad reviews the next day.”
The Sea Of Trees is available now on DVD.
