Debra Granik: Interview with 'Leave No Trace' Director

The Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival recently wrapped its three-week run with more than 250 films screened from April 12-28. Among several filmmakers who attended in support of their projects was Debra Granik, the esteemed writer-director behind the Oscar-nominated 2010 film Winter’s Bone.

Granik’s new film Leave No Trace received top billing in the second weekend of the festival, with a primetime screening on Fri., April 20.

The director appeared at the theatre to discuss the project with audience members and was later the guest of honor at the Minnesota Made party hosted that evening by FilmNorth, a St. Paul-based organization which works to support the film industry and boost citizen participation in it.

In Leave No Trace, Granik – whose other, also well-received films include her New York-set 2004 debut Down to the Bone and her 2014 Midwest-set documentary Stray Dog – turns her filmmaking eye to the West Coast.

Adapted from the book “My Abandonment,” by author Peter Rock, the film stars Ben Foster (Six Feet Under, 3:10 to Yuma) and New Zealand actress Thomasin McKenzie as a father and his thirteen-year-old daughter living in a state park in Oregon. They live primitively and in isolation, but seemingly content until one moment derails their life forever.

The morning of the Leave No Trace screening, The Celebrity Cafe had the chance to sit down with Granik. The Massachusetts born and currently New York-based filmmaker discussed the making of Leave No Trace, the common themes in her work, what the festival experience means to her, and other aspects of her career, life and the movie industry.

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Here’s what she had to say:

*Interview was edited for length*

On her latest film

TheCelebrityCafe: How did you come across the book (“My Abandonment”) on which Leave No Trace is based?

Debra Granik: We had some producing partners, Anne Harrison and Linda Reisman, who had really enjoyed that book and knew the author, connected with him, and they passed the book to us and we read it. My partner Anne Rosellini, she and I really responded to it on four major levels, the levels that we need to know, “oh this could be a film we would latch on to and do well with.” And that book had it. It had a really interesting protagonist, the setting was extremely photogenic, as written. We thought that those were two key ingredients we would need to flesh out an American tale.

TCC: How long has this film been in the works?

DG: [Our producing partners] had been attached to the book for a while… We wrote the script many different times, many different kinds of versions of the script that deviated from the novel to some extent. So, the script-writing was a long process. We filmed it efficiently… quickly. it had a lot of torque to it, which made me excited, and we edited it in a timely way, so our part of it was actually quite streamlined. But they – the original producing partners – had held a torch for this book for a long time.

 TCC: How would you compare Leave No Trace to your previous works?

DG: I would say it’s in a good flow with the previous works. I like characters that are enmeshed in their everyday life, that it’s not about rarefied lifestyles. I mean in this sense, they have an unusual lifestyle and the details are very accurate in that way. We had training from a primitive skills instructor, so that the two leads, Ben [Foster] and Thomasin [McKenzie] could perform things – and that was similar in Winter’s Bone – people from the community instructed us about real practices, we filmed with real objects from people’s homes, real outfits…

The other theme that’s very consistent is the concept of “and.” I always try to look at stories that say, “all this is happening, and there’s some more, there’s something else to consider before you make your judgment.” Their lifestyle in this film was arduous, it was non-conforming and it was also very important to them as part of their survival. People might say, “oh well that’s no way to raise a kid, you’re out in the woods,” a lot of [normative] judgments can be leveled, and the story’s asking to see the flip side – and what was working, what was important to them?

TCC: In terms of seeking instructors and community input, how important is that authenticity to you?

DG: I feel like it’s everything, and that’s the part that I get the most nervous about because you can only know a few sets of things… I always admire people who’ve lived a lot of different lives and have lived in different countries or many different states. That’s not been my life experience. I’ve actually been really grounded in this one kind of region – the American Northeast quarter. So, I love to link with people… guides, informants, fixers, people that know and who can then infuse their knowledge and then we can collaborate. Authenticity can’t always come from me – it’s part of the process of linking with others.

 TCC: What do you hope audiences take from the film?

DG: I love one of the big themes that the father character tries to instill in his daughter, which is, “how do you carve out space to think your own thoughts?” This was fascinating to us that we were picking a character, a set of characters who are not in any way involved with social media. They know about things, they’re contemporary people and he’s declining some of that… maybe [in some ways] because he’s… very hesitant to get engulfed by the very strong talons of digital society. To me in some ways they’re like fugitives –  this huge kind of engulfing digital cloud is chasing them. They’re trying to run for their lives into the woods, like, “where can I be not just off the grid, but with no reception, literally?”

It’s a portrait of what it looks like for contemporary Americans to be looking for places with no reception. Not being not receptive intellectually, but literally, “how do you carve out a niche to think your own thoughts in the culture in which we’re living in now?”

 On her common story themes and where her inspiration comes from

TheCelebrityCafe: You’re from the East Coast but most of your projects now have been set elsewhere. Why has that been the case?

DG: I think I’m attracted to stories from different states, and if I could do a lifelong project, I’d do some kind of small film in every state and call it Fifty, or something. I do like knowing and seeing details of life different from what I know. But also, the stories I’m attracted to are set in very specific places. The Missouri film was actually set there, it had to be there, the details were rich and nuanced from right there, that part of the Ozarks. It was the same with the new film [Leave No Trace]. It’s a story that takes place in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, and we wanted to keep that.

 TCC: Much of your work has involved the dark side of Americana – a couple projects have involved drugs. Where does your interest in those subjects come from?

DG: I’m never interested in drugs. I’m interested in what it takes to not do them… I get very emotional about sobriety and I find it outstanding when people can do that, make that change in their life. I go back to this amazingly complicated philosophical question that a Mexican philosopher posed to the United States which is: Why are you the biggest drug market in the world?... Why do so many Americans need to use something to feel even ok, or that they can navigate? So that’s the big philosophical question that’s the sort of poignant, heartbreaking side of our big behemoth country.

Alcoholism is global and it’s been around since we knew how to ferment things, and that’s every single nation, every single tribe on this globe. There will always be a search, in the homo sapien, to block certain feelings that are hard to cope with. There will always be a desire to maybe feel a little bit better than you feel, which will alleviate something that you can’t solve. That is to be human and that’s just the tenderness of us all.

*Switching gears in her response a little, Granik continued:*

Right now, I’m dealing with a whole group of people in my home city – my adopted city of New York City – telling me “oh my goodness, the drug trade is really low right now, we can’t make a living in it, but fitness is big. Millennials seem to not want to get as high as other generations. They seem to actually want to work out and drink green juices… if we could sell exercise like cocaine, we’d be good right now AND we’d be legal. Hallelujah.” So, I’m interested in these kinds of shifts.

Our country is a very convulsive, intense, obsessive, hard to wrangle, hard to understand country. We do live in a very pulsing nation. We’re so addicted to rocket-fuel capitalism. If it’s cupcakes, it’s gotta be cupcakes to the point where we’re all diabetic. And the swing is so repulsive – you know, from cupcakes to green juice. We’re [schizophrenic].

It’s a schizo, nano-attention-span nation that’s basically always in a state of hysteria, and this administration has just brought us to new heights of insanity. And I don’t even need to review that, we’re all living it.

I like to make films about how people survive living in the United States. Trying to get sober or try to navigate around drugs is one of the big methods, trying to have that not rule your life, whether it comes to your neighborhood and is the number one business in your neighborhood or whether it was a way that you coped with a dead-end job.

TCC: You seem to have a very sociological, humanist approach to your work. Where did that way of thinking come from – studies, how you were raised…?

DG: I think all of the above. I studied politics but within studying politics, I’m looking at movements, movements of why people try to push for change… and I definitely was raised in a family where I was always aware that my parents and my kin cared a lot about the fate of others… That was definitely the belief system I had growing up.

Related hot takes:

- I do like to show what it takes, again, to survive. My theme is survival – hopefully also mixed with thrival.

- My search is for the lyrical in the lives of working people. My search is for, “how do people survive when they don’t have a cushion?”

- I’m very interested in how people who have hard-working lives make it.

- One of my jobs is also to have constructive dialogues with people who are different than myself

- I am not looking to ridicule and gawk at other peoples’ survival mechanisms, it’s more like “Oh my God, you have no cushion, you’re doing this, I want to somehow be able to tell some stories about your experience.”

On her filmmaking process

 *Granik’s 2010 film Winter’s Bone – which earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role (John Hawkes) and Best Performance by an Actress in a leading role (Jennifer Lawrence, in one of her earliest feature film roles and her breakthrough turn) – was adapted from a book of the same name by Daniel Woodrell*

TCC: Having adapted Winter’s Bone and My Abandonment, what’s your approach to book adaptations in terms of the creative license you take?

DG: I’ve had huge creative license. In my mind, both the adaptations are very faithful to the book, or the spirit of the book, but… in both cases, I’m not of the same gender as the author. So, in some ways I have to have an eye for the gal, you know. However, in both books, the female protagonists’ worth was not defined by her sexuality, it was defined by her intellect, by her moxie. So, in those ways, I didn’t have to make huge leaps of trans-morphing her.

I think the license that I had to take in this last adaptation was just sort of the second half of the plot… and I feel like the author was very generous and open to this notion, that book to screen, there’s going to be changes, and he understood that, that it’s different incarnations of the work.

 TCC: You’ve done some documentary work, some fiction. Do you have different approaches for each format?

DG: I always wish I could flow right from the documentary to the fiction. I wish that the documentary could be done and then I could just flow right to the fiction. Maybe edit the documentary, see what the scenes are and then go ahead and – but it takes so long to do the films, you’re always sort of pressured to move on. But the approach, frequently it overlaps a lot. It takes a lot of research, basically.

TCC: What comes more naturally to you, writing or directing?

DG: I would say actually the thing that is the most natural or feels the most like I get a flow is the actual acquisition of the footage, documenting. And then from the documenting comes the writing. The writing will never be natural. I need to rely on other people, meaning I need the people to often use their own language. I can’t write a dialogue in the voice of an inner city urban male. He’s gotta do that and then I use, we collaborate on the language of the script. And then with the adaptations of the novels, a lot of times the language is from the novel, so that’s given to me. It’s dialogue – writing naturalistic dialogue has never been something that I find easy. The filming and the directing is based on this research process. If I’ve done enough research, then it comes naturally.

 TCC: What’s your favorite part about directing?

DG: Having the actor really relate to the process that they’re doing, really do something, really struggle with something, solve something, delight in something, really look at something… Tom and Will, the characters in [Leave No Trace], needing to light their fires in the morning. Ben, the actor, had really learned how to use this [ferrocerium rod] and a knife. It’s just a very straightforward but important survival technique. You don’t need matches. And I loved seeing him do that and grow in his prowess of doing that. Similarly, with Thomasin, she became really good at knife skills herself, and that was exciting, but then when you photograph someone who’s really doing something, it’s very potent. She’s concentrating, her hand is steady, there’s torque, it’s very photogenic because energy is being put in it, concentration, all these things that are very beautiful to withhold, to see, to photograph.

TCC: What’s the most challenging part about directing?

DG: Managing the variables of a production – and being malleable. Recently, just on a documentary shoot, a guy that I really was hoping [would show up], and he didn’t show up and I wasn’t malleable. I didn’t know how to just turn my camera to something else. I pouted and felt defeated and I couldn’t turn it around, and I was like, “oh God, don’t do that to yourself, stay malleable, look for the next best thing to film.”

TCC: Your films have all been four years apart since your first one – was that intentional based on breaks or how long it takes?

DG: There’s never a break, I mean for real, for real. If there’s not being a film made, then one’s being written, and maybe it’s being disregarded for some reason. Maybe it’s not financeable; we found out with one of them it was better told as this documentary. It started actually as a fiction, but that wasn’t really, it wasn’t satisfying. You can’t show all the ands and with the documentary, you can show more of the ands. The narrative, in that case, was so narrow and the documentary was so expansive, in terms of the different ways to look at the same issue, so each case is different. Four years sounds like a long time – they fly by. The level of, the mound on the desk and the amount of typing and stuff, it’s always, it feels like it’s a breakneck speed. And then some of my women colleagues have also mentioned a lot of us are full-time parents, as well, so those four years go really fast because you’re also filming a lot of events at school, you’re also reading lines for the student play and helping in different ways, helping with homework, going to the dentist, you’re doing a lot of things that actually take real time as well, so yeah, that goes real fast.

On industry aspects, and her own future

TCC: How have you seen things change in terms of women and minorities in the industry since your career began?

DG: I’m linking women and people of color together for a specific reason, which is that the changes are happening very simultaneously, but that’s what happened actually with the women’s movement and the civil rights movement, as well. Really, the phrase that matters to me is “time’s up” because I felt that since I was a kid. I’m sitting in an audience and I feel humiliated by the women character, I feel embarrassed, I’m not feeling good about myself as a female homo sapien. “Time’s up.” I was ten when I felt that.

Time’s up on cheesy, lesser, boring roles for females in the stories that we try to tell. “Time’s up” for the idea that the country is not interested in films that are made by women and people of color, so I think changes are happening. You gotta call it out first, it always has to be called out when we need social change, but this is how social change happens, you call it out. People had to call out child labor. People had to call out, “hey time’s up, we need to vote, we live in this country.” People had to call out “time’s up” on enslaving people, you know.

We are a nation because we will do things until we’re corrected. It’s not like we start out with good motives. Then a whole chorus of us have to yell “time’s up. You’ve done that for a long time now, it’s old, it’s over. We’re not interested anymore.”

Related hot take: “The fact that someone like Jennifer [Lawrence] has kept a lot of her politics and seems to be interested in having discussions about the circumstances in which we make films and the circumstances in which she participates in the film industry, that interests me, but I don’t have a direct connection to it… I stay outside of [the West Coast culture/ industry culture] so I can do my work in the margins.”

TCC: Leave No Trace premiered earlier in this festival circuit, at Sundance, and was picked up right then [for North American distribution by the company Bleecker Street]. Does the knowledge that it’s already been picked up change how you feel about other festivals?

DG: Festivals are where I see other peoples’ films, where we talk, where I get to learn what was working about the film, I get to have a discussion with viewers… and people who enjoy reading films – I enjoy reading other peoples’ films, and what discussions can come of that. So, festivals are, for me, they’re the delight, they’re the part of the cultural exchange. It’s like being a happy bee that gets to pollinate across the country, drop my pollen, get some new pollen.

I think the big relief for not being withering on the auction block is just about renewing your cultural work contract. When you get distribution for a film, what you’re being told, in some sense, is, “you could work again. You have some validity on the commercial front.” What you want nothing more is for your film to pay back the people that took a risk with it, who invested in it – even when the film is a small film and doesn’t cost a lot to make, in the scheme of things, you still want to make everyone whole, you want to make people feel like they took a risk on American storytelling that doesn’t have the traditional ingredients for commercial success, and that somehow it will break even or do well enough to support itself. That’s really what you want, you want the cycle to be healthy.

But the festivals are a delight. The film is getting positive attention. It was accepted in part of the Cannes Film Festival – Directors’ Fortnight – so that’s a really sweet thing to happen for this particular story because it’s a small story. When small stories can get recognized, it’s a happy day for a lot of filmmakers like me. When other small films get recognized, I also feel a lot of joy, there’s a lot of community, where what’s good for one can be very good for all.

 TCC: What’s next for you?

DG: I guess always the two-pronged, right now, so just finish this documentary that I’m working on in my home city – with a bunch of really hard-working individuals that are trying to rebuild life after incarceration. That’s another Americana experience.  We’ve got so many people who’ve been incarcerated, so that’s a super important story to try to look at. And then I’m working on an adaptation of a book called Nickel and Dimed [On (Not) Getting By in America]. It’s a very famous sociological book from the '90s.. by the very beloved sociologist Barbra Ehrenreich... That’s a love letter, hopefully, to New Jersey. There’s been the Florida Project, this will be the New Jersey project.