Director Debra Granik on what inspired ‘Winter’s Bone’

Published 8:02 pm Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Before she won the best director award at the Seattle International Film Festival this year, Debra Granik visited the fest with her film “Winter’s Bone.”

The film is a gripping drama about a 17-year-old named Ree (in a breakout performance by Jennifer Lawrence), who searches for her missing father within the insular world of the Missouri Ozarks.

I interviewed Granik in a hotel conference room that was larger than the film’s main location. An intense and articulate speaker, she began by talking about the novel by Daniel Woodrell that inspired the movie.

Q: Were you interested in this part of the country before you read the novel?

Granik: Before I read the novel I was not familiar with it. I’ve always been curious about ways of life in the United States that are so different from mine — I feel like I’m part of a large demographic of people that feel like they came from nowhere.

To me it’s unfamiliar to think of long-term family histories affiliated with land where there is not affluence. This is not the landed gentry, this is poverty — I say “poverty” in quotes, because this is not spiritual or cultural poverty, it’s financial poverty. Financial hardscrabble.

The area is not only geographically distinct, but it also operates according to its own rules.

Economically, too. The word “hillbilly” is always at the margins when I’m being asked about the film, and what I found (in talking to residents) was that the definition was economically derived.

Meaning, one image of the hillbilly is of a very reclusive person not participating in a larger economic system. When their houses don’t grow bigger, and they don’t have new cars and their clothes grow worn and are reused, does that make them lazy and not motivated? Are they under-ambitious? All these words are predicated on wanting to participate in a consumer society in which material accumulation is the goal.

We assume that everybody wants to be upwardly mobile.

Right. And a lot of people said to me, that’s never been a part of what folk culture has been about. You don’t always need more.

You need what you need — you need to be fed, you have to have toys for childhood, you have to have a vehicle, you have to have Daddy’s squirrel gun, you have to be able to hunt.

You need a lot of things, but you don’t necessarily need a fantasy of your house becoming four times larger than it is. It’s not being under-ambitious. The ambition is to like life for every day that you live it. It doesn’t mean you need to go out and buy something to make that life worthy.

And some traditions really speak to that: playing music for no greater gain. Not aspiring to play the Opry in Nashville — maybe expecting to win a fiddle contest.

I believe Jennifer Lawrence is in every scene, isn’t she?

I think it might be every single scene.

You really had to be in tune to this particular actress, didn’t you?

Very much, and when an actor is doing strong work, it’s like a beautiful symbiosis.

How do you find the right tone for maintaining levels of acting through a low-budget shoot?

I had the privilege of being part of the Sundance workshops years ago, and one thing I give credit to Robert Redford for fighting for is that he laments the day that American film business ever got to the point where you expect an actor to show up the day of, or the night before (filming begins), and just walk on and do it.

Actors need time to ramp up, they need to rehearse. And the producers of this film allowed for a week of rehearsal — it doesn’t sound like much, but a full week is something powerful for an actor — to immerse themselves.

Jen had time on the property of the family that allowed us to shoot on at their place, and to meet the little girl that would play her little sister in the film. That happened because they actually bonded; the character was written as a boy.

And we had to say to her mother, “In addition to using your house, your chickens, your horses, the oak tree, we were wondering if Ashley could be in the film, too?”

And they were astounded by that proposition, it was so foreign and out of left-field, but they’d seen that she’d gotten a big kick out of showing this citified crew around the property, and she’d bonded with Jen. And that would’ve never happened if Jen hadn’t shown up early.

This movie is in a certain tradition of American stories.

The western! The American western.

Ree’s not gunslinging, but she’s gunslinging through her eyes, her determination, her loyalty.

This is so tried-and-true in American films — movies of the ’30s, movies by John Ford.

The ordinary American who has one thing: one humble parcel of land, two siblings, she’s got these impeccable family values, right? She wants to keep her kin together. And she’s taking the journey of any western hero.

There she goes: She has to set out, against her better judgment, to hostile territory. She’s warned, she’s told to turn back. She’s told not to trespass or transgress, and she does because she feels that it’s worth it.

We called her a western hero in a girl’s body.

So is this a tradition?

Yes. I don’t stick American flags in my films, I don’t add them. I film them when they’re there.

Sometimes when I see a super-tattered one, one that’s exhausted, maybe is frayed, like the one that was on the family’s house that we filmed at — you know, this is the kind of western I feel the movie is.

It’s threadbare and honest. I feel like it’s a beseeching western, it’s saying “Some of us have really hard lives, you know? It doesn’t mean that we don’t have resolve, that we don’t have lyrical moments, we don’t have the sweetest children and a humble house — but bless us on our journey, ‘cause it’s hard!”