By James Mottram
Adapted from the novel My Abandonment by Peter Rock, Debra Granik’s new film Leave No Trace follows a father (Ben Foster) and teenage daughter (New Zealand actress Thomasin McKenzie) who live a life of rough isolation deep in the heart of a forested national park. When their makeshift camp is discovered by the authorities they are forced to try and reintegrate into mainstream society – something that will change their relationship forever.
Leave No Trace marks Granik’s third fiction feature and her first since 2010’s Winter’s Bone garnered four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Jennifer Lawrence (she did direct the documentary Stray Dog in the interim). Still, one question remains obvious…
Deborah, let us start with asking with emotional outcry, where have you been?
Where have I been? Well, I’ve been toiling in the trenches, you know, doing the documentaries when the narratives don’t suit the subject. So I started on a narrative a year after Winter’s Bone that actually is better as a documentary, hopefully we’ll finish that now. We took a break to do this.
Was this a project that chose you, would you say?
Do projects choose me in general? Absolutely.
But this one, specifically?
Oh yes, sorry, I would say so, when I opened the book and then you’re like in your little internal screen that you make your first pass of the movie in your imagination: big forest, mysterious characters where you wanna know why they do what they do… yes. So they do pick you, you’re correct, and it was feasible within the normal range of independent filmmaking. That’s another criteria.
Was this based on a true story originally?
Originally it was, yeah. There was a very terse article in the Portland Oregon newspaper that reported that a father and daughter had been found living for a long time undetected in a municipal park on the outskirts of Portland. And then there was an intervention and then what’s known about them stops. It’s a sealed case because she was a minor and whatnot and then the author imagined what would happen to them as the story went on. And then he kind of turned that over to us to imagine – we deviated from the second half of the novel.
Ben Foster was just telling us about the wilderness training that he did for the film…
We knew it was imperative for this film. Those things had to be performed on camera and you don’t just pick up a knife and know how to do it safely. Especially when he was hacking things and removing the tinder and lighting a fire in a moist climate with wet materials. These aren’t things that anyone can just walk on a set and do so they both agreed to be tutored by a very outstanding primitive skills instructor. It’s not survivalism, it’s really the primitive skills, knowing how to forage, what’s safe to eat, how to distinguish a certain kind of mushroom. They went off with her, I was not a part of that.
What can you tell us about the casting of Thomasin McKenzie?
A lot of the young women I was seeing had already had experience in television and they were very urban and very sophisticated beyond their years – not that Thom’s not sophisticated, but it’s a different kind of sophistication. I think, really from my side of it, it was more the level at which Thom engaged me in a conversation and showed the length that she would go to be a collaborator. That’s what I need in the filmmaking practice that I do, and she was very front and centre with manifesting that to me.
Have you had to compare her to a young Jennifer Lawrence, given you’ve worked with her?
Yeah, you know, that’s always gonna come up and I think that… I mean, I’m not gonna slag you off on this, I’m just saying I get so exhausted because why would we ever take two human beings and try to conflate them? And for me where the similarities are tremendous is that when I worked with Jennifer Lawrence, these two young women exhibited a very similar work ethic, putting your all in it, getting dirty with it. I need that for the films to work, for sure, and I’ve learned you can’t really demand it, someone has to wanna give it. You can’t really extract that from someone, they have to wanna provide that. So those similarities, they’re good ones, they’re laudable ones, they’re ones that I would celebrate as a low budget filmmaker because it means that this person isn’t just expecting to walk on, they’re expecting to contribute.
But is it a coincidence, that similarity? Because you don’t get them that often. These kind of strong, young, female characters, they’re completely different, but in a way they share the same sensibility.
You know, I think it’s hunger, right? Thom’s hungry, she’s eager, she’s got an appetite, she would like to work, she’s not just having someone tell her what will be good for her career. At the time that I met and connected with Jennifer, she was very hungry to learn. Both these actresses did something I observed, they both were really, truly learning from the more experienced actors they were playing with. That means you’ve got to not feel like you’ve got it all sewn up, you can’t be all cocky, you’ve got to have this appetite for a whole bunch of things. So I agree, it’s not a coincidence, it’s the attributes that are just so invaluable to make new films good.
Leave No Trace is screening at the Adelaide Film Festival and is closing the Brisbane International Film Festival.