Director Debra Granik

Debra Granik's first film, "Down to the Bone," introduced much of the world to Vera Farmiga, who would go on to stardom in films like "The Departed," "Orphan," and and Oscar nomination in "Up in the Air."

Granik's new film "Winter's Bone" seeks to spark a similar career for its star Jennifer Lawrence, whose relentless portrayal of Ree, a teen who has a week to find her meth-addicted father who may or may not have jumped bail, before the government takes their house.

Granik spoke to The Yap about "Winter's Bone," about the stark authenticity of the film, and whether her film, along with 2008's "Frozen River" forms two parts of a Rural Women trilogy.

How did you get started with “Winter’s Bone”?

We got started with it by reading the book, this novel by Daniel Woodrell called “Winter’s Bone.” The book was a compelling read, and my partner I make movies with, Ann Rosselini, and I both really loved the book and we really latched onto this female protagonist. She was a very full-bodied, tragic character, and we haven’t seen the likes of her for a long time. She’s like a Western hero in a lot of ways. Very captivating, and so was her life. We sought out Daniel Woodrell and actually went down there and met him. We got the permission and it went from there.

The first thing that hit me about this film, and I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I watched the Korean Vengeance trilogy, and I was joking that this was kind the second in an American trilogy with Rural Women Looking For the Men Who Wronged Them. I was thinking of “Frozen River” and thought “Winter’s Bone” compares favorably to that one. Did you see “Frozen River” in the process of making this film? They’re similar in tone and they both have that grittiness and a sense of rural realism.

“Frozen River” was definitely a role model for us. Not the content per se, though there are similarities, but the scope of it and how it was made and the fact that audiences were really able to see a side that was interesting being an independent film. In the sense of making a film outside of the major industry, “Frozen River” was an extremely positive role model for us. And the fact is that there are content similarities that you pointed out, but since the stories were set in such different regions that didn’t strike us as hard as just what kind of film it was and how it struck us.

Well, and you get people like Charlize Theron, who gets acclaim for “going ugly” or “going gritty” in a film, using makeup and things, but your film is a step beyond that. It’s even more realistic, and at the end of the day Charlize Theron is still incredibly glamorous and beautiful and it takes all of this makeup to make her seem she even belongs in a world like that. The people here seemed natural and authentic.

I so appreciate your comment. I’ve never really had the chance to discuss this. The woman I made this film with, Ann Rosselini, made this comment about how if you airlift someone into a situation, no audience will forget that. They’ll always have a sense…that doesn’t mean they won’t play along, but there’s this actor that the audience adores, but the fact is a character will always seem airlifted into an environment. The dream we have as filmmakers is that if we cast all of these local people, there’s a way that there can be some kind of hybrid or, if you will, cross-pollination, where the cast can have a rich array of local people and local actors, then some more experienced actors will come in and have life experiences that pertains. Many of the cast that came from out of state had rich experiences acting, they had life experiences growing up outside of Missouri. Whenever a film can cast in this way, and doesn’t have to rely on casting very well-known, if you want to call them stars, for its financing, there’s a chance you can have a cast where people may feel like they have roots of understanding for where the film is being made. We were thrilled that the cast for this film was comprised from the ingredients it was, and Jennifer [Lawrence, the film’s star] has very rich experience. She was in two films prior to “Winter’s Bone” but the fact is she wasn’t so well-known or over-exploded that there were people saying “Oh, that’s Jennifer Lawrence doing that role.” Instead there was a little opportunity for the audience to accept her as Ree versus trying to isolate her and understand her as a star who is in a role.

Speaking of Jennifer Lawrence, how comfortable was she in carrying a film like this? It’s certainly her film, the central character without a doubt. How did she handle that, and how did you encourage her and guide her along the way with a character that has to have that certain amount of self confidence and brashness even though there are these horrible consequences to what she wants to do?

Jennifer, I always love to give her props for this specifically, but she did such a great job of reconciling her expectations and my expectations. Her expectations were that the shoot would be arduous, and she understood that she would have to do her own work. This would be someone that she would have to put her own guts into. We were actually filming in Ashley, who plays her sister, in Ashley’s real-life home. She had to learn how to do many tasks on that property. She had to learn to use firearms, and she would have to be down there and actually put herself into. And she signed onto that very willingly, and proved herself to be a woman of her word and proved herself big time. My work was easy with Jen because she was an absorbing device working with John (Hawkes) and Dale Dickey, who played Merab. She was observing…I don’t want to call them her elders, but she was observing actors with more experience than her. What I was able to do is put her into a real environment. She had real tasks to perform. She real children to wrangle, and real animals to wrangle. That is one thing that I think all actors respond to, and they build a foundation from that. They’re actually immersed in something.

If we can go back for just a second to the look of the film, how did you visually capture the distinct look of the film? It’s like the layer of gloss most movies have is gone.

You know, our job was to be very astute note takers. The DPs, with photographing, the production departments were photographing with great detail. We didn’t need to mess with what we found, because what we found was a life that a family had set up in itself, and it looked much like the life that was described in the book. It was believable that this was their house, and these were their toys. The wardrobe was inspired by teen women in the environment, and we did an exhchange. We had new Carhartts, we had new flannel shirts that production was able to acquire, and we exchanged them for things that had had a life from that environment. These are specific coordinates in the United States. This isn’t just anywhere. These are hardscrabble people that live in this area in Missouri. Many of the homes are hand-built, and people have different textures in their house, and use 5 different building materials in their house. That’s what we wanted to capture. We didn’t have to create that. It’s what exists in 2009 when we filmed, and that’s what contributes to the look of the film. I’m not trying to be coy and say we were hands off and didn’t do a thing. Of course making a film is an arduous process, and the DP and the camera operator and the prop master all had a huge amount of work to do to make this film realized, but the fact remains that their muse was a life that was lived in and a habitat and a house and a dwelling and a home that had character and history, and we were permitted to film that.

That is really interesting. I have never thought of exchanging new clothes for stuff that has been worn.

Yeah, clothing departments often have to distress clothing. You know, they have new clothing and have to make them look worn, but it did not just make sense. First of all it felt wasteful because the people could use those garments to great effect, and they had distressed their clothes over the past years, and just lived life. Their Carhartts have frayed cuffs and necklines and it made no sense other than to make that exchange. It was just like the logic of the conditions in which we were filming.

If we can, I’d like to move to adapting the novel. How did you balance the needs of the film’s narrative, condensed to 90 or 100 minutes, to the book’s layout. How did you approach making those changes in the script?

Are you also asking what gets lost from book to screen?

Yes.

One thing a book can do is describe a huge amount about a character’s inner conscious. What this does is allows a person to know what we have felt in the past about her father, what she knows about her family before the story starts, about a time before meth, why the family’s land means so much to them. How this is achieved in a film is exposition, and that’s an enemy to film, frankly. Some films use it to beautiful effect with voiceover or other forms of exposition. But when a character is told at the beginning of a film that she has a week to solve something, that deadline becomes a tyranny. It becomes a sort of mistress the film must serve. Her journey is a little bit relentless. She doesn’t have time to ruminate or have lyrical voiceover about her family’s history. So what gets lost is some of the inner workings of Ree’s family, and things that are admirable and rich, and in some ways the heritage of hill country that people do want to talk about, a sense of self-reliance is unparalleled. Sometimes we were able to show that in Ree’s character. But some of that heritage gets lost. Also there were scenes between Ree and her best friend Gail, scenes that showed Ree as a much more normal teenager where she was at ease. But we had to operate under the notion that Ree has a fire under her. Once the character is able to relax, it dilutes the notion that she has pressure. These were the quandaries we had. And I love to show details of her life, and we couldn’t show nearly as much of that as we wanted to.

So where are you now? Are you working on your next projects now, or are you still in some sense doing post-production on this one?

We’re trying to read scripts as fast as we can, and we’re working on our next script. Right now we’re trying to work on the DVD, because there’s some really lyrical material from the community that worked on the film: anecdotes, interviews with members of the community, definitions of the word “hillbilly,” things that couldn’t be in the film. So we’re trying to work on that, and it’s a balancing act, trying to give this the best sendoff we can, and also make sure we’re immersing ourselves in new projects.

It’s interesting you mentioned the DVD portion. A lot of filmmakers really dislike doing that. Steven Spielberg has a ban for instance on doing commentaries. He thinks it ruins the magic of the film. How do you feel about that?

Gosh. In this film I really feel the other way. Because we collaborated so profoundly with a different location. We were a mostly coastal urban crew, that then met the crew in southern Missouri, and we had all of these local advisors, people who basically were experts in their own life, meaning they understood wild game, how to make their lives work, they understood the housework. This was really a film with a diverse people. I’m not trying to make it like a Mr. Rogers scenario or something, but this film was not some rarified enclave of a California studio, making a special effects film. Americans in southern Missouri who have never been involved in filmmaking had a huge input in this film, and a making-of would be the only way to capture that.