Interview by Zoë Elton
Debra Granik’s “Leave No Trace” traverses the lives of a father and daughter who have been living off the grid for years in the woods outside Portland. Traumatized by his past, war vet Will (Ben Foster) is unable to adapt to mainstream society, so he raises teenager Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) in the wild.
Granik approaches her work like no one else. Her films are set in the sorts of places that aren’t usually depicted on-screen, focus on outsiders, and are rooted in an understanding of the bits and pieces of lives and life that we might miss seeing, if not for her eye and sensibility. A self-described visual anthropologist, Granik’s work is also notable for its collaborations, especially with producer and screenwriter Anne Rosellini: they’ve worked together since their first feature, 2004 Sundance winner “Down to the Bone.”
We recently spoke with Granik about “Leave No Trace” and her writing process at a screening in conjunction with Mind the Gap, the Mill Valley Film Festival’s gender equity initiative.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
W&H: With this film, you’re coming from a novel, and you’re making it your own. Producers Anne Harrison and Linda Reisman found it, right?
DG: Yes, they had optioned the novel. They’d really liked it from a few years ago. They had held the torch for it for years — it was a 2009 novel. They brought it to my producing partner, Anne Rosellini, and me, and they asked us to read it. Then we had a really robust discussion about the novel. We may [have] come to it with slightly different reasons or attractions, but it was the basis to make the film together.
W&H: So were Anne Harrison and Linda involved with the writing process at all?
DG: I mean, they’d always read every draft and we would meet on the phone, give notes, and exchange lot of feedback.
With Anne Rosellini, I work very closely. She reads every draft, her notes are excellent. I can ask anything of her — I can say “what do you think of the difference between this or this,” or, “I’m torn here,” or “this isn’t working for me,” and I can be so specific and push her, ask her to respond to very specific things.
W&H: I was curious about that, because you two have worked together for a really long time. Are you always the person doing the writing, and she’s the person responding to it? Or does she write as well?
DG: Mostly, I do the actual scrivener work, and she’s responding, and then if there’s something where I just say, “This monologue is really long. What parts do you like?” She’ll circle, and then maybe she’ll rearrange them, and she’ll send them back in a different way.
W&H: As a Brit, I’ve noticed that there’s often a credited script editor on European films.
DG: Oh, yes! Yeah.
W&H: And, as someone with a theater background, I’ve also worked with writers as a dramaturg. One of the things that I’ve noticed with American indie films is that there’s not much script editing going on. It sounds like you and Anne have actually created that model in a way that sounds fantastic
DG: Yes. I would say yes, that that’s a very good description of it. And that she and I really assess and talk about the story together, and that’s the place where we have a very extended dialogue, the whole time. And she’s certainly very, very involved, on set as well. She’s also very involved in editing. She’s in that inner sanctum of responding to each cut. It was us and another young colleague from San Francisco, [Victoria Stewart]. It’s very intense and significant to put our heads together, because we’re not the same. It’s not totally group-think. So we challenge each other and we know each other well enough that I think we can be honest.
I think sometimes, if Victoria and I toil on something really long in the edit room, I think there’s been times that it’s hard for Anne to be as frank as she needs to be. She’ll be like “oh, my God, they’ve worked so hard on this,” but then she remembers that her actual duty is to be frank. It doesn’t serve us to coddle some things. So she always musters that result: “One of my jobs is to be really honest here.”
W&H: Has the way that you work together evolved over the years? You’ve been working together for, what, [over] 10 years or something like that? It’s several significant projects.
DG: It’s definitely, definitely evolved. For some of those years, we actually lived in the same city and shared an office, a different M.O. And now she lives back in her hometown of Seattle and I’m in the East. She comes to these quarterly [meetings], so Victoria and I have the benefit of having her in the office and we can try to cover a lot of ground, do a lot of meetings. It sounds dated and cliché, but it really is possible with the way [we collaborate]: within a few minutes of sharing writing, [we know which parts] work.
W&H: And I think if it’s with somebody that you know so deeply, that it makes a huge difference.
DG: It does, it does.
W&H: Can you speak a little bit more about the process — the road map in preparing for a film, and the script specifically?
DG: The scripts that we make when we’re going into shooting are very traditional. They’ve got all the dialogue called out. [But then it may be] amended, and you shape by the actor or by a real person who informs it –you know, an expert in their field, a real social worker, or the real minister’s going to write the real news, going to use his own language. I’m going to be in that church service and take notes and then say, “I noticed you mentioned this and this.”
So when we go to a location with this road map, as you called it, which is true, that’s a good word for it, then the reality of that location is going to inflect the script heavily. But it is laid out, and then we’re receptive to change, but the fact is, going into the day of shooting, on Day 1 and Day 30 and all the days in between are just totally there.
W&H: It’s structured?
DG: The whole crew needs that. Again, it doesn’t mean that in a take, that Thomasin can’t say something differently, or Ben can’t say something differently, that’s fine. Or I might see that that line isn’t so great, and the way she changed it, it’s so much better and I’ll say “keep that.” I’ll hear something differently and I’ll ask her to do something different, but the gist of the scenes is there. It would be very nerve-wracking if it wasn’t. For days and weeks and months before shooting, the script is asking you, “What do you really think’s supposed to happen in this scene?” The script interrogates you.
W&H: I keep thinking that if you don’t know, if you don’t have a strong sense of what the truth of the story is, you can never finish it.
DG: Yep. And you still might never know ’cause there might be contingent truths and multiple ones.
W&H: That’s true!
DG: But you do have to know something about the characters we’re seeking, what they need — it’s true: Especially with difficult characters! This father character has a lot of really difficult qualities that could make him not just unappealing, but he’s problematic on many levels, so I had to know some of those things in order to even believe in him.
W&H: When you’re dealing with a character like that, how does that translate into the writing of a psyche as opposed to the writing of the language? Does that come through as the writing of action?
DG: [Partly] the choices they make. Trying to figure out, if you make choices against the grain, or if you make choices that are arduous, or unappealing, or things that we wouldn’t normally do, to live in a way that’s against the grain takes a lot. Anyone could come up to a character like that in real life and just say: “You know, brother, it’d be just a lot easier if you lived more like everyone else, it’d just be a big load off, it would just be easier.” ‘Cause then you got to know why is he not doing that.
W&H: So it’s always testing those pressure points?
DG: He’s got to have his reasons, and the backstory has to tell you something about him.
W&H: With “Leave No Trace,” was there anything that “upset the apple cart” in any way, either between writing and shooting? Were there any surprises that you didn’t anticipate?
DG: There always are. The cart does get toppled and you have to right it and put all the apples back in and get back on the horse.
I can think of something that happened on the really good side, too. There has been a lot of beekeeping [going on in my projects]. Something’s carried over from the previous feature I did, a documentary which was called “Stray Dog,” and that was about scrappy survivors in an unusual community that kind of practices “live and let live.”
At the very end of that film, this bee had come into the frame and this big, kind of burly guy speaks to this bee. I didn’t expect him to. I didn’t expect him to care about bees — I didn’t expect him to even be conscious of, or have anything to do with, bees. This leather-clad biker said to the bee, “I’m not gonna hurt you, little fella. I need you.” And I was like “oh, God, I just saw this big guy just talk to a bee and this bee has just gotten to me, too,” and I’m trying to think of “Who’s this adult that’s gonna reach out to [Tom] when she comes to this enclave of scrappy survivors?” I think the beekeeper’s going to reach out to her, and the beekeeper’s got something to offer someone, and specifically to her. You don’t just saunter up to a beehive. You have to be taught.
Susan Chernak McElroy, who plays the beekeeper in “Leave No Trace,” is a real beekeeper. That was serendipitous, but she also had the acting chops — she’d actually been a presenter on a children’s show years ago, and she was so spiritual about it and she was so verbal. And she had so much to say and she had so much to teach the real Tom — Thomasin loved learning from her. She was able to teach Tom step-by-step how to actually touch the bees, so this grew into something that far exceeded any expectation of what it was going to be like to put the bees in the story and then have someone enact that.
W&H: So you think the image of the bee in “Stray Dog” essentially embedded itself in your creative imagination and moved forward?
DG: Yes, as did a lot of the backstory for the idea of combat veterans. Having the main character of “Stray Dog,” [a Vietnam vet,] take the time to gather his friends and sit, and allow me to sit with them over a period of three years and hear very detailed workings of PTSD. And Ben had already actually done some of that work in previous films. He had actually talked to vets through his other work.
W&H: Are you working on something at the moment?
DG: I am. An adaptation of “Nickel and Dimed,” a book by Barbara Ehrenreich, a champion of working Americans.
W&H: Yes, absolutely. Right up your alley!
DG: Yeah! She’s someone who’s really tried to chart what happens when capitalism convulses so dramatically.
“Leave No Trace” is now available on DVD and VOD.
