Father and daughter tale Leave No Trace hailed as one of the films of the year

Debra Granik’s tale of a father and daughter who try to leave society behind to live in the woods is being hailed as one of the films of the year, writes Esther McCarthy.

Winter’s Bone — Debra Granik’s powerful account of a marginalised community in the Ozarks — made Jennifer Lawrence a star and got four Oscar nominations.

The writer/director’s new movie shows that that exceptional film was by no means a one-off and again sees her telling stories of people on the fringes.

Leave No Trace is the extraordinary tale of a father and daughter (Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie) who live off the grid in the forests of Portland, Oregon, peacefully but out of sight of the authorities. Their seemingly idyllic lives are shattered when they’re discovered by police and put into the care of social services.

Her work on Winter’s Bone helped turn Lawrence into the world’s best-paid and most-in-demand actress in Hollywood. In her discovery of McKenzie, Granik shows once again her knack for finding new talent.

But she admits she was reluctant to cast the young New Zealander initially.

“I always try and cast from the region first, always. I auditioned in many different ways, I maybe underestimated how intense this role was,” she told me.

“It was also, as petty as it sounds, a financial concern. We had never accommodated the idea of bringing someone from far away. But then it was really sealed in a couple of conversations with Thom that were done long distance. She was so active in her imagination and in her willingness to discuss the book and the script. I thought: ‘I can’t ignore the fact that this person is giving me so much creative juice already’.”

In the case of Lawrence, the young actress understood the world and region of Winter’s Bone.

“With Jennifer, it was definitely that she’d been raised up in the nearby region. She understood the dialect, she didn’t ask me to decipher it. For words she didn’t know — it was very charming — she called her father, if it was an older expression.

"She had this affinity for the region and that meant a lot for that film. She was not born into those circumstances by a long shot."

That was not something we were pretending or anything like that, but she was extremely regionally affiliated and that was a huge asset to the role.”

On the set, the young J-Law was ambitious and focused, recalls the filmmaker. “Very disciplined, very receptive to learning from people. As you know, she has a very sharp sense of humour. But a very hard-working individual. At the time, and I don’t know if she feels more jaded, she must because she’s been on so many productions, but she was very fresh to the world at that time and a really collaborative human being.”

Leave No Trace is adapted from the novel My Abandonment by Peter Rock who was himself inspired by a true story he read in a short newspaper article of an army veteran and his daughter who had been discovered living in the woods in Portland.

“It was a small, brief article and I think it sent him as a novelist into a wonderful journey of imagining what would happen beyond the facts of the article,” said Granik.

“Because it’s not an issue of life rights, the real person can’t be accessed, there’s no reason or right to research them further, because you don’t have their permission to tell any more detail than what was made public knowledge. So in that sense, the beginning of the film is very close to Peter’s description, meaning that he imagined from the article what their day to day was like. And maybe how they traversed out of the park and obtained, once a week, some groceries in a very normal way.

“One person had reached out to him, to the father, he’d recognised that he was a veteran. They connected a little bit on that level, but they were reclusive people, that was my understanding. I think they were private and that’s very much a part of how they remained undetected. They weren’t making themselves known.”

Just as the novelist did, Granik took her own storytelling approach to what might have happened to the pair. “In my imagining what happened was slightly different than the author’s. We talked about that, and he encouraged me to go on my own trajectory with what happens.”

Her storytelling is subtle and multi-layered, nudging the audience to think and sometimes even be conflicted about how they feel about a certain character. How does she judge it so well?

“It takes a great audience,” she said simply. “If my cultural work is to be a storyteller, it’s like what jazz musicians say, then you need a really open-minded listener or viewer. You need someone who wants to engage with stories that way. Decipher. Ask questions as they’re watching that are in service to pondering why we make choices we do. Who are the people we care about and what forms us?

“In some great sense, the viewer is providing that balance. We are intrinsically curious about how people form themselves and the paths they take. It’s hard sometimes to reflect on our own choices, on our own paths, and that’s sometimes why we seek out others. To learn about self. It’s a constant dialectic and I like to think that there’s a way that film can keep that part of human inquiry alive.”

There has been much debate about gender representation in the film industry, but for the director the challenges are more varied. “Your filmmaking brain, of course, is affected by your experience as a gendered person, but it doesn’t control your interests all the time, right? Then again, people that control the commerce of filmmaking do affect what stories are deemed commercial and what is promoted and how they’re promoted.

LEAVE NO TRACE is phenomenal. one of the best films i’ve seen this year. why did we have to wait this long for a Granik movie

— David Sims (@davidlsims) June 26, 2018

“For me it’s more of a monetary, financial, ethical ghetto that I’m in. It’s more like the things I’d like to make films about aren’t seen as intrinsically as commercial as other subject matters. That’s where I find some of my challenges. Finding support on the front or the back of the projects.”

Does four Oscar nominations not help kick that door down? She laughs. “Not if you’re doing films about the lives of everyday people in the traditional social realism. The US has a tradition in that but it’s not as well supported.”

Still, she is determined to continue telling the stories of people on the margins. She’s currently finishing a documentary about four people attempting to re-enter society following incarceration, and developing another about what she calls: “the war against poor people” which will look at issues such as the chipping down of wages and the collapse of the service economy.

“There’s a big mess there, but who doesn’t want to find the people who use their wit and their humour to survive it? I’m once again in search of the scrappy survivors.”

Leave No Trace is released today.

No matter where you are, your thoughts are yours to keep. #LeaveNoTrace pic.twitter.com/SsU1RpDGbz

— Leave No Trace Movie (@LeaveNoTraceMov) June 22, 2018