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Interview: Debra Granik on Leave No Trace and Tuning Into Everyday America

Granik talks about how she learned to connect with those in the heartland.

Interview: Debra Granik on Leave No Trace and Tuning Into Everyday America
Photo: Bleecker Street

Debra Granik’s social-realist films, concerned with people living on the margins of mainstream American culture, abound in engrossing and enlightening details. And like her 2014 documentary Stray Dog, about a burly Vietnam vet, Ron Hall, who’s all about creating nurturing communities, Granik’s three narrative features to date focus on individuals leading hardscrabble lives. The first two, Down to the Bone and Winter’s Bone, catapulted Vera Farmiga and Jennifer Lawrence, respectively, to stardom. And her latest, Leave No Trace, which features another veteran—Ben Foster’s Will—at its center, may just do the same for Thomasin McKenzie.

In the film, the 17-year-old New Zealand actress plays Tom, the severely traumatized Will’s teenage daughter. Both live off the grid outside Portland, Oregon, until authorities arrest Will for squatting illegally in a public park and attempt to re-acclimate him and his daughter to “normal” society.

Last week, I talked with Granik at her publicist’s office in New York. Animated, sincere, and intensely committed to her every word, she spoke of the importance of kindness, why her films tend to launch female actors into stardom, and what she, a liberal Northeastern artist, has learned from her work about how to connect with likely Trump voters in America’s heartland.

We just accept that films like yours will play at festivals and art houses and won’t garner big audiences even when they get great reviews, but sometimes I wonder why. Do you think it’s because most people don’t want to watch stories about people who are living in poverty or on the margins of society?

I think so. One of the things that’s hard to argue with, and I think about this all the time, is that the main way we see the word “movies” is as entertainment, right? If one is going for escape or time out or relaxation, to see social realism is—if you’re living it, or even if you’re from a very different sort of social class and you’ve just never felt at ease with the way the economic culture is structured, on top of everything else you deal with, it can be hard to go seek that. It’s not really entertainment any more.

Also, we’ve cranked up and celebrated and gotten really invested in bloodlust, the idea of being jolted by physical violence, and you actually need to keep jacking it up. If a violent scene starts to be four minutes, what happens when it starts to be seven? And then 11? I remember my kid asking while watching Wonder Woman why one battle scene was so long. That film was supposed to kind of go against the grain, you know? And I said, “Once they’ve put that much money into the infrastructure of creating that battle, they have to amortize it.” It has to be there for 11 minutes.

But a big philosophical question that’s racking my brain is: Besides the taste for blood, which we’ve established, do we have a taste for stories that don’t use physical violence as the primary threat? To see how a person withstands setbacks and navigates around difficult obstacles of pay, finance, rent, whatever it is? It’s hard to peel back from that hydrocortisone.

I get the feeling that you’re passionately invested in the films you make. Are you partly motivated by telling stories you think are important for other people to hear, or so you just find stories you feel you need to tell?

It’s much more the latter. To try to anticipate an audience, what they can and cannot deal with, what might resonate, is the work of the big industry. They calculate. They do testing. They try to do something that gives everyone different things. Our posse [of independent filmmakers] is schooled that you’ve got to be interested yourself. Not because it’s all about you, but because that’s the only calibration point you have. There’s no way I’m so unique that the questions that are on my mind aren’t also on the minds of other people that I inhabit a society with. And the other beat is so heavily done! The beat of the affluent, the opulence, Generation Wealth. That beat is so well done by Kardashian TV, Us, all the ways the big system operates.

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Right now, I’m catching up with a lot of social-realist films, and I’m loving it. I’m asking why, in the ’30s and ’40s, did people watch the films of William Wellman or I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang or The Best Years of Our Lives? Steinbeck. King Vidor. Why did people tune into the lives of everyday Americans? It’s helpful to know that, in a country that makes self-esteem contingent on your material acquisition, there’s nobility also in having the fortitude to survive a scrappy life, or a life that isn’t given to you off the fat of the land, where you’ve worked very hard for what you have or just to survive. Nobility outside the glamor that our country privileges.

That nobility is definitely in your films. So is a faith in generosity, which is part of what makes them feel realistic. There’s a kind of cynicism in most blockbuster films that says the only way we can resolve conflict is by killing or fighting each other. But the social workers who force Tom and Will to leave the woods in Leave No Trace genuinely want to help them, not just punish them. In fact, they actually do help Tom, in a roundabout sort of way. And that feels true to the way the world works: Most people try to do the right thing and to help one another, even if they don’t always succeed.

Right. And there are endorphins that are released when you help people, so it’s not even just a self-satisfied little “I did good.” We actually get a little positive jolt out of that. I worry a lot about the conditions of others. Part of the intensity of being a New Yorker is that you’re constantly exposed to all the ways in which life can be tremendously challenging. You see it in the schools, in every realm of daily life. It’s a lot. So, when I see something that shows that things can work, that what’s good for you can be good for me, when there’s amelioration, when there’s kindness, those are like my jellybeans that go into my basket. [laughs] I’m seeking those things, for sure. It’s the counterbalance to feeling that things are a real struggle, especially when things get very dark on a national level, if you don’t want to believe that there’s nothing but snark, there’s nothing but rage, there’s nothing but feeling so alienated.

Speaking of the national scene, your movies are about mostly poor white rural people who live outside the mainstream. That happens to be the kind of people that a lot of reporters in places like New York suddenly started trying to understand after the 2016 election, since so many of those people voted for Trump. Do you think the things you’ve learned while making your movies have given you any insight into the Trump voters who feel like mainstream culture ignores or disdains them?

You know, from the trajectory of my life, I didn’t expect to spend substantial time in, say, southern Missouri. Before Trump, I felt like I was sort of on that Nikita Kruschev-Kennedy phone line—you know, the one after the missile crisis? It’s like I’m on a very small version of that, where red and blue people are talking on a kind of emergency hotline. It’s an incredibly tense, charged interaction. I kept thinking about a comedy where red and blue families do a cultural exchange, like the exchanges that were so popular when I was growing up. Students from Omaha would go to a small town in the industrial north of Belgium or something, find their sister cities. Cultural exchange was what was happening for me. They [the subjects of her films] allowed me to be there, and what allowed me in was the “and.”

And by the “and,” you mean…

That Ronnie in Stray Dog could be heavily armed, and very excited about the anatomy of guns and their political ramifications, and can fall in love with a Mexican woman and work tirelessly for seven years to facilitate her arrival here with her two sons. The and of guys [in Hall’s biker group] who would have been xenophobic, but once one of their brothers welcomed a Mexican family to their community things shifted, and then something like 50 people in that community all deal with the fact that Mexicans and Americans have really complex relationships. So, here’s a person who aligns himself with a lot of the tenets of contemporary, angry, working-class, underclass whiteness and who doesn’t feel good about a wall, who doesn’t see it like that.

All I know is that time and conversations seem to be the only answer. With social media, all you’ve got is your arrows and your darts to sling, and you can do it anonymously, with your hood on. As much as I worship at the feet of long-form journalism and the journalists who do it, even reading articles, no matter how much they expose, isn’t enough. I’m left with the arduousness of what it takes. It takes going there. It takes in-person conversations. It’s not going to happen here. [taps my laptop] It’s not going to happen in a post. Unless the post is like, “What I see in your community that I appreciate is…” The vicissitudes of capital are so brutal. When there’s widespread economic dysfunction and collapse, people are left to the side. It’s so amazing to me that we don’t think about the problem being that the pyramid is so steep, that we are being pitted against each other for a disappearing slice of the pie.

But the easiest catharsis is to be rageful. I’m so fascinated by anger management, and the men that I’m attracted to depict are men who are able to manage their impulses toward aggression and violence. Because it is very, very, very hard to do. The brain issues signals otherwise.

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You helped to launch Jennifer Lawrence and Vera Farmiga’s careers, and now Thomasin McKenzie is burning up the screen in Leave No Trace. Do you have some kind of Spidey sense for scoping out great actresses?

This isn’t about discovery or magic. In every crowd of 50 people, professional or nonprofessional, there are people that we would be very attracted to on screen. In every 50 humans. I’m trying to make roles that are rich for female people, and that means showing a woman’s personality and their moxie and what it takes to be them. Of course, that also means to recalibrate their sparkle or their pull on screen so it’s not sexualized. It’s who they are as a person and what it means for them to navigate. By navigate I mean usually survive, to get somewhere that they need to go, whether it’s sobriety or basic needs like retaining some kind of dwelling, some assurance that your family is going to be all right, for Tom in Leave No Trace. So it’s the roles. It’s the Bechdel test. You get to see more of their facets, right? And these three women wanted to give their all. They wanted to dig in deep. It’s equal parts that—more so! I’m providing the room for them to show what they’ve got.

Another wonderful actress, who you’ve cast more than once, is Dale Dickey. She plays a totally different type of person in this film than she did in Winter’s Bone and is great in both. She gets cast a lot, but I don’t think she’s ever had a starring role or gotten the attention she deserves, which raises the question of why she hasn’t also become a star.

Well, Dale doesn’t conform to traditional standards about how women should look. I know, the DP knows, that she’s hugely photogenic, but she didn’t alter her face. She did not remove the marks that show time and life, which to me are what make her photogenic and interesting and relatable. Up until now, there wasn’t too much space for women like that. If you were a man, you could be grizzled and wrinkled and very bristly and it makes you salty and interesting and dramatic. Dale is all of that—well, not bristled. [laughs] But that’s a question the culture has to answer. That’s on us.

That’s also on women actors. They need to start saying: “Unless we’re all taking off our clothes in this movie, I don’t know why I’m supposed to take off my clothes” or “I don’t need to wear sexy clothes” or “I don’t need so much makeup.” The rebellion has to take place. Don’t show up in spaghetti straps if the role doesn’t call for it, right? To be unclad at an audition is to pander to the proclivities of people that love to see ingénues barely dressed.

True, but I can understand why actors do that, since it may be hard to get cast if you don’t.

No doubt. I’m just saying, we have to push back on that.

It was seven years after your first short before your first feature came out, and another six years after that before the next one. Is it just hard to get all the necessary parts to line up for films like yours, or is there something about taking your time that you like?

[laughs] No, it’s not that I like it. The films are never just “okay, let’s just get some A-list people and call it a day!” Without the big machine to make things happen, it can take a long time to get interest, and financing without using the traditional benefit of using a financeable star adds a couple years to the process. Also, the research takes time. That’s the part I enjoy the most. My added value is in full swing, and I’m liking my life. Getting involved in the deal-making part of it can be overwhelming and dispiriting. So, I really love the research.

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Is the research mostly going to where you’ll be filming and talking to people?

Yes. Absolutely. Doing workshops or interviewing people, using transcripts. Some journalistic tropes, or documentary tropes. And when the narratives [films] aren’t a go, I’m very excited about being able to take a camera into the streets and keep filming. It gives me a chance to practice my art-making, my being in it, without everyone telling me whether I’ve got the green light or not. I decide, me and my closest colleagues: an editor and a producer. We’re green-lighting it because we’re doing it.

Elise Nakhnikian

Elise Nakhnikian has written for Brooklyn Magazine and runs the blog Girls Can Play. She resides in Manhattan with her husband.

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