Interview with Benh Zeitlin: Wendy's director discusses the small wonders of his movie

When writer-director Benh Zeitlin made his feature film-about 2012 & # 39; s Wildlife of the South, many critical answers were, “Where is this guy come on ? ”The film, which eventually won an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and Actress, is intriguing and poetic, but its magical story about childhood and nature is told with compelling emphasis.

Zeitlin has been quiet since the release of the film, for obvious reasons whenever he talks about his new film Wendy, the contemporary Peter Pan once again recorded in the West Indies, with a kind of absurd confidence and the obesity of the natural world. Zeitlin and her sister Eliza (who co-wrote the film and designed the production footage) grew up Wendy over the years, we reconsider and re-evaluate matters while the site is being explored in remote, almost inaccessible places. They both draw on their childhood fears and thoughts to shape the story, with Darling children Wendy (Devin France), Douglas (Gage Naquin), and James (Gavin Naquin) joining Peter Pan (Yashua Mack) on a night train to Neverland. There, they meet Mother, a light-hearted monk-like creature who puts on immortality in her crimes.

While visiting Chicago WendyFollowing the release of the theater, Zeitlin spoke to Polygon about the concept of "truth about the film" effects, the complexity of the postmodern design, and how trust in nature meant that the film came back.

This discussion is organized for clarity and clarification.

Photo: Jess Pinkham / Twentieth Century Fox film

You and your manufacturers have doubled mentioned in the discussions that you shot this way of watching a movie movie, that the whole process was unnatural. What was unusual about the way the film was shot?

Benh Zeitlin: Perhaps the biggest thing is just the number of unexpected, dangerous things we have brought to the process. The general idea when making a film is to make sure that you minimize any surprises, and I think we are invited to more cities, and let the realities guide the film, directing how things went. We've worked with kids, and untrained actors. We have been trying very hard to make this experience on the screen as close as possible, even though it's bigger than life. Working on real trains, shooting active volcanoes, traveling to these far-flung destinations – you don't always know what's going to happen on any given day. The challenges pushed the shoot and culture of the project to become more open, they must always be flexible. That gives you the energy and feel of a different film than a more controlled film.

What kind of happy accident did you end up with?

We were always dealing with changing areas, because we were shooting in very sensitive areas. We planned the universe to shoot at this remote beach, building a staircase down through it with a trunk face, within a few months. And we got to the sea one day, and the sea was gone. It was just the sea. Such things would happen every day. Sometimes it was a disaster, sometimes it was a miracle.

In one of our workouts – we had this passion when we first documented the incident where Douglas, one of the twins, disappeared into the water. Half of the group thinks he is dead, half of the group thinks Mom saved him. The incident was recorded for a specific location. We got there a few days from the shooting, and that desire, which was always calm, was just a stream of white water. The dove beneath it and found a nest of sea urchin that could not be erased. It was totally unbelievable to shoot there. And I didn't know how we would solve the incident, as the shoot was approaching again.

So one of the scary things we did was to sink the boat, Mañana, on purpose, near there. It was a great adventure, trying to land that boat safely. Shipwrecked, and we had a great celebration in the water. I never even thought of the idea that it could be a place – we were sinking an outer boat. But we swam in it – it was a wonderful time as the crew celebrated – and it hit me, “If the boat was there, this would be done directly by the children. That's how Douglas should disappear, trying to swim in the bowels of the ship. "This is just one example of how the whole event is renewed based on discoveries, and the film's shooting environment in a place you can't control.

You have a lot of water shooting under the kids. How did you link that securely?

We had a really awesome stunt party, obviously. Whenever a child is under water, there are many separate telephones, ready to help when something goes wrong. And a tremendous amount of practice. We met the kids in 2014, 2015, at the time, some of whom did not even know how to swim. So we spent the better part of two years doing great training on the water, getting everyone swimming until they were safe.

Particularly with Devin, the process of learning how to make underwater is about the hard things you can do. You start by just opening your eyes. And then I'm like, “Can you take a breath? Can you learn to hold your breath enough to get a shot? ”There was a huge amount of exercise in the pools. Throughout the process of development, I always remember the draw. You just start every day at the shower station. And you know you're going to be wet all day.

In a way, it was really good, because the kids love swimming. One of the biggest challenges of the film was that it was always fun. These were not child-athletes, they had no aspirations to become players. They are all unprofessional players. They are real children, and they want to have fun. So to be able to say, "Pride is in today's pool!" it's always been a good thing, because it makes them want to show up and do the work. Most of those scenes were very challenging for the crew – shooting underwater is very complicated – but I think for kids, it was actually the highlight of getting to do all these moments in the water.

Photo: Searchlight Photos.

Much of the early attention goes to your Yashua Mack broadcast as Peter Pan. How do you see the character? And it is true that you found her “inside the Rastafarian unit into the deeps of the forest ”?

That was a way of mistakenly wrong, of course. There was no forest in the forest, their community is on the main road in Antigua. They are in the forest, but not deep in the forest. But one of the main things we were looking for, one of the first two ideas, was that we wanted Peter to be so young, so young as we could ever miss him. Much of what we want to bring from the first story has to do with this frozen child during this time before you realize that your action has consequences, even before you pay attention to anything other than entertainment. We wanted him to get closer to the end of that year, and feel that momentum in the film, and we wanted it to feel real. So we were looking for very young children.

Another basic idea was that, this movie is close to natural magic. We wanted to take Peter Pan's magic, get rid of myths, weird things that felt kind of dark, and make all the magic come out of nature. So we needed a child who loves to play outside, a playground and its toys that can be natural, all different natural environments, water, trees, ash fields, lakes, rivers, mud. It had to be someone who didn't feel scared again at home in the forest playground.

When we first found out there, and seeing how difficult it would be to travel to some of our dest inations, we came to the idea that we should try to spread the character locally, and have someone so accustomed to playing that way, who would feel like he had lived in this place for hundreds of years. Those were the main ideas, and we never really knew if we were able to get them out.

Chasing there was a huge challenge. Many times we went from house to house to see that people had children of the right age, and they wanted to take out accounts, and we would work out of their house outside their house. Then we had this amazing baby. When I first met him, frankly, I thought he was too small. He was five, and it was like, "This is going to happen." But when he did that first audition, when he fell into a good mood, that was a miracle for making a movie, for me. I just couldn't believe how powerful and just and controlled he was, how he was able to make someone other than himself. That moment I knew we were making a film.

Photo: Searchlight Photos

You mentioned in the interview that one of your principles was, "If Peter Pan made a movie, what did he do?" How did he do that?

We really had to live this story. We didn't want to do the trick. We would build a boat set, then shoot it on a green screen, and we would cover the sea back. It would work very well, and we found exactly what we thought, and it'll be easy. That is an older version of shooting a place on a boat at sea.

But what would Peter do? Peter would catch the boat and sail across the sea with all his friends. All such choices, when you turn away from what may be easy, fast, and clean, then move on to the truth of the matter you are discussing. I hope what you get is filth, it gets worse. It's not exactly what you thought, many times, but you get a real sense of adventure and adventure, as well as the thrill of a real adventure.

Many stories of children, the myths that make up childhood, are told in a wonderful way of human thinking. Like, (Disney's action movie of 2016) The Jungle Book it happened in the woods, but maybe that kid never came out the whole time he made that movie. There is no real connection with the planet, or the danger of traveling as a child. We wanted to bring childhood, we made a film that really covered the outdoors and connected with nature.

What would become of my mother?

Much of it was a personal story between me and my sister Eliza, who was the mother of a real mother, both pregnant and forming with her team. We were trying to find out where the magic of youth in the film came from. It started with a volcano, and the idea that it was the real source of youth in the world. A volcano is a type of place where the earth was born. It is connected almost all the way away from magma, in the center of the earth. And we started to look at the microscopic organisms that breathed out of the hydrothermal vents in the center of the earth. We imagined this magical creature who was almost the heart of the planet, the protector of happiness, the protector of the earth. We envisioned an eruption in which he was hauled from the center of the earth, and he found the last surviving child of the volcano to act as his protector. That was the myth surrounding the creature.

And then there was the notion that the film is a feeling of youth freedom, a skill that young children should play with just being left careless, and caring nothing. That is the freedom you have only through the protection of your mother. You only get that kind of childhood when you are protected and cared for. So we wanted to take that idea and put it into a mythical version, interacting between Peter and this creature that protected him and kept him young.

Photo: Josh Brasted / Getty Searchlight Photos

How much of a creature ends up being a functional effect, rather than a CGI?

Almost everything works. There is a lot of integration involved to get him into new situations, and the work done with the renovation. But we are really determined to clear the limits of what can be done through underwater play and photography. The film was from me and my sister's childhood, sitting in our basement watching the VHSes of The bride of the Princess, again Willow, and NeverEnding Story. We wanted to make a payment for the work of the creature in those films, in the world of artists who made these amazing real creatures and props and sets of films. We wanted Mom to have that truth. We didn't want the film to sound like it was built on a computer.

So over the course of several years, we explored and invented methods to map underwater. There was a variety of inspiration on the river, drawing it underwater. We wanted him to be fully kinetic, which was a huge challenge. Every single part of her had to be moving at all times, to feel the vibrancy of the water, and the usefulness of the carpet. Then you take that to the world of results, trying to figure out how to put him in his place. It was actually very difficult to make important effects on the top of this creature, because it has a moving camera, and a walking stick on every inch of its face, so tracking anything over there has been a huge challenge. We had an amazing VFX team that did a fantastic job, but we had to build almost what we could really shoot.

Wendy it's undeniably fun to be an adult. There is a sense that when you get there, your life ends. You mentioned that you were pregnant with this film as a child, when you and your sister were still young, but did you feel like that as an adult?

Our aim has been to make a film that looks at old age with hope. I think this is a film tour. It really starts with these ideas, alongside my childhood experience, the fears that will happen to you, to see how adults act, how they don't play, how they don't think. My sister and I both had – and have! – this kind of intimidation is that at some point, how magical you find the world as a child goes, and you don't know why, and no one really tells you what's going on, or how those things are handled.

But hopefully Wendy's film tour solves that. That is the question we have settled on – finally, do you realize that this childhood journey is as fun as having a baby? That was certainly the experience we live to make in the film. Through art and movie making, we have come to realize that the beauty of growing up to achieving what you thought as a child. You get the power to actually become your reality and experience it. That was our experience in making this film, and hopefully the journey Wendy took on people, from this sad, hopeless loss of growth to something with such hope and joy and childhood freedom.