Written Interview: Benh Zeitlin (“Beasts of the Southern Wild”)

Alex Billington at FirstShowing features this week’s written interview:

Meet Benh Zeitlin. I always love coming across young up-and-coming filmmakers. In January earlier this year he broke out with a little film called Beasts of the Southern Wild that exploded out of Sundance, with awards and critical praise. The film went on to play at the Cannes Film Festival, where Benh won the Camera d’Or. I saw it at both Sundance and Cannes and fell in love with it (my glowing review), it’s one of my favorites of the year as well. I’ve been anxious to chat with Benh about “Beasts” ever since Sundance and finally got the chance, as Fox Searchlight is debuting Beasts in limited theaters this week.

Excerpts:

Where did the origin of this idea come from? It’s so incredibly original and unique, and I love that idea, so I’m wondering how exactly this story came together?

Zeitlin: I think what makes it… there’s a lot of different people’s creativity intersecting in the film. It started off with me wanting to make a film about holdouts and traveling to the end of the roads in Louisiana; there’s sort of five roads that go down into the marsh, and finding this vibrant series of towns, right on the edge of where the land is falling off into the water. So that was kind of the origin, the beginning. But I didn’t really have a character story within that.

Then, at the same time, I was working on a short about sort of taking my friend Lucy’s (Lucy Alibar), the co-writer’s play, Juicy and Delicious, and trying to turn that into a short film. At a certain point I realized that the little girl’s story of losing a father and the community’s story of losing their place had this emotional through-line that was connected and was sort of the same emotion in both stories. And it became my way through the larger — this humongous thing that I wanted to say through this very tiny story that unlocked it in a lot of ways.

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Where do you think your style comes from? Or what specifically makes up your filmmaking sensibilities? I think it comes partially from the culture and the world that you were living in Louisiana, but I’m curious what else?

Zeitlin: I mean there’s certainly a huge amount. As far as trying to get inspiration for the movie, it’s much more about traveling in the world than it is about sitting in a DVD player. And that’s not to say that I’m not a movie fanatic. I love movies from the beginning to now in every form. But I try to focus on developing a style that reflects the world that the story is about and trying to make a film by the same principles of the characters that are in the story. And it goes back and forth. These characters who have such tremendous ingenuity and the ability to survive in this fearlessness and perseverance and kind of recklessness. We try to infuse the style and the process of making the film with all those elements. And then probably, at the same time, I want to tell stories about those kind of people because I am that kind of person myself.

I think stories aren’t personal to my life, so there’s kind of a style and a type of person that I’m interested in, and I think it reflects back and forth in the process to the actual film. Certainly there’s tons of cinematic influences as well. I think it comes from… I started doing animation and learning from… I’ve worked with these animators who had worked with Jan Švankmajer, and they sort of had this quality of — where you’re going to build this mythological epic story, but you’re going to build it all out of bone, and meat, and string, and twine and not fabricate anything. I think building something big out of small parts is something that I’ve always just been… I’ve always wanted to be sitting around in my corner building something by hand. So now we’re doing that with like 95 people all sitting around in a corner building something by hand and it kinda turns into this big thing.

For the rest of the interview, go here.

Here is the trailer: