Written Interview: Debra Granik (“Winter’s Bone”)
Co-writer (with Anne Rosellini) and director Debra Granik talks about Winter’s Bone. Some interview excerpts:
After “Down to the Bone,” were you actively looking at secondary material for a subject or did you come across Daniel Woodrell’s book by chance? How did you find it?
Anne [Rosellini, Granik’s writing and producing partner] and I were searching for a story that had a female protagonist that we were not just drawn to, but one we felt had a full life, a full set of attributes — not just one thing she had to rest upon. There are so many of those, certainly in the large script circulation world. We were getting lots of stories about young women, but they were often about the things that go very wrong in life — I call them female pathologies.
It was like there’s a list: what makes women interesting on screen is if they can overcome something very bad in their past, if they escape abuse, if they overcome a very bad psychiatric condition, some kind of disorder.
We were feeling like, this can’t be the totality of what women’s lives are like on screen, or of women’s experiences. And so it was so refreshing to see [a character] with a certain kind of determination, and we loved how she responded to people — you couldn’t predict her responses because she related very differently to different characters.
Was there any talk of including Woodrell in the collaboration on the script?
He was very open — in retrospect, we might find it completely uncharacteristic — but he understood that when a book has its next reincarnation, that it will be different. Real locations will now be the visual evidence of something he conjured. We tried to match very vividly the kind of house Ree Dolly lived in, and we found places that felt right, where my brain would believe that this could be Ree Dolly’s house.
I pimped this movie months ago: You must see it. In any other year, I think much of the buzz about a Best Actress Oscar would be about Jennifer Lawrence’s remarkably strong and poised performance as Ree Dolly. Simply terrific. And John Hawkes as Teardrop is fantastic (he’s nominated for Best Supporting Actor).
For more of the interview with Granik, go here.