Interview: Debra Granik, writer and director

Published on Wednesday 8 September 2010 12:39

In the hard-scrabble world of backwoods noir Winter's Bone – where strangers aren't much welcome, the law less so, and asking the wrong questions, hell, any questions, is a good way to end up "ate by hogs" – women don't mess around with frivolous concerns and pipe dreams.

• Debra Granik's Down to the Bone launched the career of Vera Farmiga, below right, with Hugh Dillon; Jennifer Lawrence is the focus of her new film, below left and centre Main pcture: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty

There's no glittering career as a legal crusader just waiting around the corner, no sports stars in the making in need of nurturing, and certainly no men ready and willing to ride in and save the day.

Life is tough, but there's no time to wallow in it, even if you're a 17-year-old girl whose status as primary care-giver to a vacant mother and pre-teen siblings has just been worsened by a methamphetamine-cooking father going AWOL after putting the family home up as collateral for bail.

That's the fate that befalls Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), the no-nonsense protagonist of Winter's Bone - and it's precisely Ree's up-against-it-quest, and unwavering pursuit of it, that makes the film stand out from a lot of female-led American cinema, which has a tendency to feature characters who are either go-getting career women or misery-wracked victims.

"That's what I love about this character," nods Debra Granik, the film's effusive, articulate co-writer and director when we meet the day after the film's Edinburgh International Film Festival premiere. "She's a female homo sapien who is competent and interesting to watch… without being perfect or ber-anything."

Based on a novel by Missouri-based writer Daniel Woodrell and set in the bleakly beautiful environs of the region's Ozark mountains - hauntingly captured by Paisley-born cinematographer Michael McDonough ("It kills me that I'm here without him," says Granik) - the film has also afforded Granik the opportunity to present an American Western heroic archetype in a girl's body.

"That's such a beloved, tried and true, classic storytelling format in the United States. To have a person who understands what their mission is, who has something to fight for that they believe in, who crosses a line and is told to go back, who is warned and (even though] the warnings get increasingly intense, what they believe in and what they're fighting for is worthy enough that it almost becomes a black-and-white situation.I haven't seen that so often with a female protagonist."

The result is canny blend of genre and social-realist filmmaking, a movie that offers the many pleasures of a tightly-wound, stripped-down mystery while transcending the Deliverance-style clichs that have attached themselves to movies about mountain people. Not that Granik doesn't remain acutely aware of the exploitation charges that could have been levelled against her, especially as someone coming into the region as a film-maker from the North-east of the US to explore a subculture that was not only alien to her, but which has been badly stereotyped.

"There's a history there that is so rich in lore, with all these chapters involving moonshine and marijuana and methamphetamine, that people tend to be like, 'Oh god, no, that's why you want to come down here? That's the story you want to tell?' And then look what happens: we come along with a book that has meth in its content."

It was crucial, then, for Granik, to make sure the locals were familiar with Woodrell's novel first. "All the families that participated had to know what the content of the story was, because it would have been horrible to betray people or misrepresent ourselves.

"In the end, I think the people felt that they had had so many instances in their own lives of peers, neighbours and relatives having had some kind of gnarly brush-up with crystal meth that they felt it was a worthy fact to put in the film."

Making the community feel part of the film was certainly important in winning their trust. Shot entirely on location, the film has a vivid sense of place, something that even informed the casting. Ashley Thompson, the little girl who plays Ree's six-year old sister, for instance, actually lives in the Dolly family home. "Those are her toys you see her playing with, that's her trampoline the kids bounce on in the opening credits; the smoke from the smokestack is from her family's wood.

"There's a real proprietary feeling in the area about the film," continues Granik. "I think that people feel that they were a very important part of making the film, and they were."

That Granik approaches film-making in this way is largely down to the training she received. After graduating from college, she worked with trade unions making educational films, something that enabled her to indulge her scopophilia - "That's how filmmakers like to define the desire to look," she says, laughing. "It's a kissing cousin to voyeurism of course, but it is really about taking a keen interest in other people's lives."

Finding herself more and more enamoured with the lives of those she was filming, she sought out a way to marry this very specific film-making experience to fiction and found it at New York University where she was mentored by the Latvian filmmaker Boris Frumin ("a rigorous, badass Russian dude" as Granik puts it).It was Frumin who introduced her to Italian neo-realism, British kitchen-sink realism of the 1950s and 1960s, and the great American cinema of the 1970s - all of which have clearly informed the look and feel of Winter's Bone.

"He basically said, get out there and look at daily life you're not familiar with and see how carefully, how precisely and how gently you can document that and learn something from outside of your limited experience."

The result was a Sundance-winning short film (Snake Feed) that was subsequently followed by her Sundance award-winning debut feature, Down to the Bone (which helped launch the career of Vera Fermiga, Oscar-nominated earlier this year for Up in the Air). And now there's the Sundance-winning Winter's Bone. (The title similarities are purely coincidental. "I'm not making an osteo trilogy," laughs Granik.)

The difference with Winter's Bone, though, is that it has already broken free from the festival circuit thanks to strong reviews and a profitable theatrical run in the US, which is likely to be repeated in the UK and elsewhere. The timing couldn't be better for Granik either, especially with Kathryn Bigelow's historic best director Oscar win earlier this year finally waking up Hollywood - and the media at large - to the fact that women can be as successful and versatile as directors as they are as producers.

Has Granik noticed a change in attitudes? "It's not like women directors are statistically prominent - that will take a long time - but I do feel like the support is there. What I do think is interesting and valuable about The Hurt Locker's success is that it seems that people might now trust women with making movies about other subjects and telling stories about men as well.

"You know, the depiction of women gets put in a box, so doesn't the depiction of men?

"I think more women would love to have a crack at telling those stories, so maybe there might be a little more variation in what gets put on screen. I think that would be exciting."

•Winter's Bone is in cinemas from 17 September.