Peter Machen speaks to director Benh Zeitlin about his ground-breaking film Beasts of the Southern Wild.
The extraordinary film Beasts of the Southern Wild tells the apocalyptic story of 6-year old Hush Puppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) who lives with her distant but loving alcoholic father among a group of outsiders in a bayou in Southern Louisiana named the Bathtub. From Hush Puppy’s perspective, the universe is a fragile web that depends on everything fitting together just right. Faced with rising water levels in the bayou, she imagines the melting ice caps delivering vast shelves of ice into the sea and mythical horned beasts named Aurochs arising from the ice.
I spoke to director Benh Zeitlin about the making of this remarkable, ground-breaking film which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year, as well as a slew of awards at Cannes and other festivals around the world.
Peter Machen: Although Beasts doesn’t feel like a big budget film, I’m sure it wasn’t an easy film to make. Can you tell me a little about the financing of the film and how you got Sundance involved?
Benh Zeitlin: Sure. The process of financing the film actually wasn’t difficult at all. Really, the challenge for us was fitting the story inside of the budget that was available to us. What basically happened with both Sundance and this company Cinereach was that they saw my short film that I made before this and contacted me and asked me what I was doing next. At the time, we’d just started an early draft of the film and they said “you have to make the film on a low budget. You know, we have to pay for the whole thing”. And they were an incredible company. It was the first time they’d ever financed anything, and they gave me complete artistic freedom, which is something that you really never see in the States, especially for a first-time director.
PM: That’s amazing. What budget were you given, if you don’t mind me asking?
BZ: The film ended up costing about $1.5 million.
PM: That’s even more amazing.
BZ: Yeah, we budgeted it out, and we figured it should have cost over $14 million dollars or so if you cost it the way you’re supposed to.
PM: On that basis, how much of the film includes digital special effects?
BZ: Very, very little. The only complex digital effects are in the final sequence where the aurochs meet Hush Puppy. Almost all of the rest of the effects were done in-camera with miniatures. The aurochs were Vietnamese pot-belly pigs in costumes, which were then filmed in slow-motion. There were tons of effects that were laid on top of that – like, adding textures, removing scraps from the costumes – but basically, most of the effects were pre-digital era.
PM: I presumed so. And the fascinating thing for me is how much more convincing non-digital effects are.
BZ: (laughs) Well, you know when something’s alive. You can’t really simulate life. So that was the way that we felt – the way that we did the effects. There was a lot more that we initially imagined the aurochs doing, and we stripped away a lot of that, logistically and story-wise. But that was our feeling – what you gained by having a live animal, with real eyes, with real motion, with real skin textures and its own kind of independent personality would add so much, that it would work writing around what we were capable of training it to do.
PM: The film is really beautifully written and Hush Puppy’s voice-overs are particularly beautiful. And I was just wondering if Quvenzhané in any way added anything to the voice-over, if you used her existing speech patterns or anything?
BZ: Yeah absolutely. You know, the way the project worked is that the purposes of each voice-over were probably written into the original script, as well as some of the language. But we went through the process of interviewing Quvenzhané and finding out what she thought about different issues in the film. I’d say “How would you react? How would you think about this? What would you say in this situation?”. And a lot of that got written into the voiceover. And what is there is definitely a collaboration between me and Lucy Alibar – who wrote the script – and Quvenzhané who kind of put things in her own words, and also inspired a lot of the types of thinking that are in the voiceover.
PM: The first time I watched the film, there were immediate echoes of William Faulkner, and other critics have picked up on this. And I was just wondering if Faulkner was an actual influence, or if it’s just kind of coincidental, just how it happened?
BZ: Um, I mean, I love Faulkner’s work, but I certainly wasn’t looking to it specifically. But when you think of the way that The Sound and the Fury works, the way that the narrative spills out of itself and tingles, I think there’s some kind of tradition that’s the same. But I don’t know that I was ever looking at Faulkner in a specific way. The author I was probably looking at most was Roald Dahl actually!
PM: I know it’s not an issue movie, but do you think that the film is going to make some people think about their relationship to their environment?
BZ: Yeah, I do. And it’s not that the film isn’t about issues. It’s just not about political parties. I certainly think that there are things in the film about people’s relationship with nature and with their homes, and the way that the world is modernising and causing these fringe communities to disappear – all that is in there. It’s just not framed within the context of , “Well, now that you’ve heard this, go vote for whoever”. I think that for me, when species disappear from the planet, it shouldn’t be something that you decide how you feel about based on what political parties you’re affiliated with.
PM: How did the Louisiana community respond to the film?
BZ: Amazingly! That was definitely my biggest fear. After the film came out, and great things happened at Sundance and all that, we were able to show the film in Louisiana for a little while. And had it gone over poorly, no matter what else happened, I wouldn’t have felt satisfied. But you know, we set up a screen down in Montegut, Louisiana, where we shot the film, and just had an amazingly positive and emotional reaction to it. It was really incredible.
And seeing that I never knew how people were going to react to it –the film isn’t a piece of realism, and there’s no place specifically like the Bathtub; It’s definitely a somewhat intractable interpretation of the place – that was amazingly well understood. People knew that it was about the issues and the place and that it wasn’t like, you know, a documentary, and they really responded to that.
I think it’s rare that people down in that region get portrayed in any way that’s respectful. A lot of the coverage that comes out about the people that hold out during the storms portrays them as irresponsible, suggesting that they should move and that they’re uneducated. And there’s a lot of pride in seeing a film where the holdouts and the survivors are the heroes as opposed to being presented as some deviant group.
PM: Where does “Beast it! Beast it! Beast it!” Come from? (The phrase is chanted by Hush Puppy’s fellow diners while she devours a crab).
BZ: (laughs) You know that’s an interesting question. I don’t know whether it pre-dates or post-dates the title of the film but it’s something that me and all my friends use – you can use it when you sit down for a meal and devour whatever you’re eating. If you sit down and eat an entire pizza in one sitting by yourself you’ve “beasted” that pizza. But you can also use it, you know, if you have like 50 pages of your script to write – you can “beast” that. It’s just about kind of charging into something and attacking it with all of your power.