If ever a filmmaker had permission to let acclaim go to his head, it’s Benh Zeitlin, the 29 year old writer-director of “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” a no-budget neo-realist fantasy that has taken awards at Sundance and Cannes, and earned rapturous reviews, major awards from critics groups and now Oscar nominations for best script, picture, director and actress.
The film, set in a mythical community of Louisiana down-and-outs, is “a love letter to the people of the Bayou State, who have persevered in the face of apocalyptic tragedy,” raved The Atlantic.
The film’s blend of grim poverty, unflinchingly observed, and magical realism make is “so completely unique that it’s hard to imagine how it was even made,” marveled The Guardian newspaper.
But Zeitlin sees this attention not as a chance to sell out to Hollywood. “I hope these awards and the distribution can be a source of leverage for us to maintain our methods, our way of making movies,” he says. “It’s a film born from hardship, but it’s the way we want to make films. The brush that we use to paint is so specific that I don’t want to change that.”
“Beasts” is about a little girl who lives a hardscabble existence with her father, neighbors and teacher in The Bathtub, an off-the-grid community on one of the disappearing islands of south Louisiana. It sprang from Zeitlin’s short film, “Glory at Sea,” and from the native New Yorker’s experience of post-Katrina Louisiana.
“I wasn’t planning on moving to New Orleans, but by the end of that short film, I was drawn to their stories — why people stay. What is the magnetism of the place? I started driving to these towns at the very end of the road, at the bottom of the marsh. I wanted to make a film about the end of the road, about hold outs standing by their homes, no matter how modest, no matter what. The Bathtub to me is not a place for the down and out. It’s a place for the defiantly independent, off-the-grid, truly living free. Money, as a concept, doesn’t really exist there. The people in this world we made have ingenuity and not money. You don’t have a job to live in the bathtub.”
Zeitlin, the son of New York folklorists, brought an outsider’s eye to the region, and found the resilience of the locals inspiring — “They get knocked down, they pick themselves back up. Even in the darkest moments, there’s a celebratory culture to the place. It’s like a jazz funeral. Somebody dies, it starts with a dirge and turns into a party. That refusal to have your spirit broken is the greatest inspiration about being there.”
He’d sit on the docks, typing out a script, and a fisherman would say, “Computer man, turn that thing off. Let’s go fishin.'” Zeitlin would learn how to catch catfish with his bare hands and other bayou survival skills.
“Beasts” is built around a tiny, scruffy but plucky child, Hushpuppy, her rough, no-nonsense daddy, and the “apocalypse descending on them,” as Zeitlin puts it. Thanks to climate change, the island is washing away, outside of the levee system that is speeding up the process. Leaving that island will mean people who have lived off the grid would suddenly be “in the system,” subject to the rules, laws and meddling of the state. Zeitlin wanted to focus on what they would lose in the process — their independence, their DIY survival skills.
“Our crew really absorbed that make-do ingenuity. The boat the Hushpuppy and her dad fish from used to be my old Chevy pickup truck. One day, it exploded on the set, and thinking like the characters, we wondered “What would he do if his truck blew up? He’d turn the bed of the truck into a boat.’ Which we did.”
“Beasts of the Southern Wild” (review here) has unprofessional actors, children (Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis), animals and water — three of the most unpredictable elements to build into any film shoot. Zeitlan & Co. soldiered through that. “We didn’t take a whole lot of advice. We tried to set up those challenges — working with kids, working with animals, working in water — as the texture of the movie. We wanted it to feel chaotic and out of control. We weren’t out to craft this perfect thing. We wanted to create chaos and sort of chase it as a film crew. The chaos takes on a life of its own.”
And that’s what he hopes to cling to in future productions, that freedom and disordered chaos.
“It’s great to get all this attention for this film, but we’re hoping to use that as a way to continue doing things the way we’re doing them.”
The Oscar-nominated French Canadian drama “Incendies” takes us from Montreal to Lebanon as two 30ish siblings try to unravel the mystery of their mother’s life and flight from that country decades before.
