American indie film-maker Debra Granik, who gave Vera Farmiga her breakthrough role, showcases another rising star in her new film. She spoke to Peter Calder.
At the Sundance Film Festival, the mecca of independent film-making in the US, Debra Granik has a perfect record: everything she has made has carried off an award.
Her 1997 short film, Snake Feed, about a day in the life of two addicts, won the short film-making award; it then formed the basis of 2004's Down to the Bone, a brilliant, searing drama about a woman's precarious recovery from drug addiction, which was the breakthrough role for Vera Farmiga and earned Granik Sundance's Best Director laurel. And with her second feature, Winter's Bone, she took the supreme Grand Jury Prize at this year's festival.
Granik says that after Down to the Bone, she was deluged with scripts that "left me beyond cold: about alcoholics or drug addicts or other pathologies. What was missing was the counterpoint of a character who has a lot of force and inner reserve, a desire to make her life work that would make a character much more attractive".
Enter Ree Dolly, the central character of the new film, which opens in cinemas here next week. An adaptation of Daniel Woodrell's striking 2006 novel, Winter's Bone introduces Ree - a quietly charismatic Jennifer Lawrence - a 17-year-old reluctantly cast in the role of mother to her dirt-poor backwoods family. When her father skips bail she is faced with losing the house and land, which he's posted as bond. She has to find him - dead or alive - and there are plenty of people who don't want her to succeed.
Woodrell writes in a rich folk-tale prose that is at times thick enough to chew on. He describes Ree, for example, as hoping that her young brother and sister would not be "dead to wonder by age 12, dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean. So many [in her family] were ... groomed to live outside square law and abide by the remorseless blood-soaked commandments that governed lives led outside square law". And Granik says Ree's elemental fairytale character is what attracted her to the story.
"It's pure fable, pure fairy story," she says. "Woodrell really has used this classic structure of a young person going into the woods, seeking something. She is warned to turn back, and the warnings get more intense. She has to complete a challenge and she has to bring back evidence of having completed it.
"It was really interesting that when the film played at Berlin, people of German and Scandinavian heritage, who have [had] tales from the woods for ever, they recognised that ancient story form immediately."
The film's setting - the Missouri Ozarks - remains mysterious to most urban Americans who lump Appalachian and Ozark people into the same dismissive category of hillbilly.
"The prominent hill cultures of Appalachia and the Ozarks have only just begun to be understood and chronicled well," says Granik. "We became familiar with the fact that wild game is a big part of these families' diet - including squirrel when needed [a sequence in the film shows Ree teaching her young siblings how to gut and skin a squirrel], but how to survive on that land was something very new for urban audiences."
It's safe to say that the film doesn't set out to glamorise Ozark life - for one thing, about every second person is using or dealing crystal meth (what we call "P") - but it did mean getting to know it in a pre-production process that was like visual anthropology.
"It's a brick-by-brick process," she explains, "and it begins the first time you ask to take a picture and then you start to talk about the project. When you are working in a place where you need local expertise, then by definition it becomes a collaboration."
That collaboration extended to the local musicians who feature in a scene that was entirely cast by a scholar of Ozarks' music, Meredith Cisco, who sings in it.
"She was very savvy in helping us select people for that scene. She said, 'I'll make the invitations and I bet they'll show'."
But sharing her plans meant dealing with the reactions they provoked. One woman expressed her anxiety that the book is "all about meth".
"And I told them that I had no intention of glorifying meth or showing it on screen as cool, ingenious, outlaw behaviour. It was going to be a sombre account through the eyes of a girl who has lost a lot to the drug. And ultimately they felt good in Ree's hands.
"They knew she would do right by them."
LOWDOWN
What: Winter's Bone by indie film-maker Debra Granik
When and where: Screening at cinemas from Thursday
-TimeOut
