With less than 24 hours before its theatrical debut, the reviews for Benh Zeitlin’s “Wendy” are decidedly mixed. That’s slightly unfortunate because out of the 25 or so films I saw at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, it’s one of a few features that has stuck with me. Zeitlin’s re-imagining of the “Peter Pan” myth has its issues, but no one can ignore its gutsy and decidedly unique vision. Well, true cinephiles can’t.
READ MORE: Ben Zeitlin crafts another wondrous world with “Wendy” [Sundance Review]
Having already digested an early interview with Zeitlin that ran before the festival, I was aware of how personal the project was and how he’d ignored other Hollywood opportunities following the Oscar-nominated success of “Beasts of the Southern Wild” to pursue it. But what was striking about speaking with Zeitlin in person was how humble he is about his creation. There is no arrogance in how he describes his process. He knows it’s unconventional. He realizes it’s time-consuming and he is keenly aware that how he’s worked on his last two films may not be greeted with open ars in Hollywood again. But it’s the only way he knows how to make his art, so he endures.
Zeitlin is an auteur who isn’t interested in $100 million budgets (although who would say no to that?) or having the biggest stars in the world headlining his next project. He clearly has no drive to win an Oscar let alone land another nomination. And if “Wendy” doesn’t speak to enough people? Well, he’ll keep moving on. And maybe after reading this interview, you’ll be curious enough about his seven-year project filled shot on remote Caribbean islands with first-time actors, sunken ships and active volcanos to not wait to see it until it hits your favorite streaming service. Or maybe not.
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The Playlist: Is it true that you hired an agent just to push people away and not send you projects?
Benh Zeitlin: Yes, that is true. Well, I was, frankly, terrified by being approached by agents. I didn’t know what was going on and I was very intimidated by the whole kind of culture of the movie business. I knew Graham Taylor because he had sold “Beast” and I was like, “Graham, can you just say you’re my agent and just stop this from happening anymore?” I mean he didn’t represent directors or really do that work, but he was like, “Fine, we can do that and I’ll totally just shelter you from, the assault,” at the time.
Was it because the projects you were being pitched you would never want to go near?
No, it was really being very certain about what I wanted to do next. I work in a way that’s really immersive, and I don’t function doing multiple things at the same time. I’m not a business, I don’t have a staff. I’m A dude that lives in New Orleans and makes movies with my family and friends. I wasn’t trying to change that and having gone through the whole [industry] process, I was pretty intimidated by it. I felt a real cultural disconnect between how I want to work and how regular movies, for lack of a better word, get made. I knew I wanted to continue the project that began really before “Beasts” with my short film, “Glory At Sea,” when I moved to New Orleans. I knew that project had to continue and there was no way that I could kind of live in both worlds. So, I just didn’t see the purpose of entertaining a radically different approach to making movies, I guess.
But you had, with “Beasts” this amazing run. You were nominated for Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars.
Yeah.
Were there producers trying to find you in new Orleans and knocking on your door, trying to get around him to be like, “Seriously, you have to read this?”
I would assume, yes. [Laughs.] Every once in a while [Graham] would break down and be like, “Behn, I have to tell you about this one. I would be guilty forever if I didn’t just mention that someone approached me about this.” But literally I was working on “Wendy” this whole time. Everybody who knew me knew what I was going through and knew that there was no way I could work on another film indefinitely. It was never considered and not in a hostile way. It just was, at Sundance 2012 is when I talked to my producers and my sister about wanting to make “Wendy.” We all sort of knew what that meant. That it was the most difficult film that I’d ever wanted to make. Basically for me, the opportunity of the Oscar stuff and everything that happened with “Beasts” was like, “We can skip straight to the most difficult film that we’ll ever try to make and that’s what we’re going to use this opportunity to do.”
How many years ago did you even first think like, “Hey I want to retell this story?“
Forever.
Teenager?
Toddler.
Oh, wow.
It was part of me and my sister’s personal mythology dating back as long as I can remember. Obviously “Wendy” is not the film we would have made when we were toddlers, but wanting to tell a story about the loss of growing up and the fear of growing up and try to solve that like terror within ourselves. The story that is this tension between freedom and caring and the way that those two things fight against one another, so that had always been around. Then this moment of what happened with “Beasts” was so interesting and exactly that way because we had been sort of making films in this Neverland state, and then suddenly it was like the world came crashing down into Neverland. It was clear it was never going to be the same. It was like, “Well, in order to stay free we have to design the craziest possible movie that could never be controlled and really see if we can continue to make films the way that we always have, the way our process works, the way our principles are, within this new context.” No one could have found us making Wendy.
During that period Joe Wright’s “Pan” was also released.
Oh, yeah.
It seems like every couple of years there’s some other iteration.
Yeah.
Did that concern you?
I mean, this isn’t really a “Peter Pan” movie at the end of the day. I mean, I think we really even thought about whether we even wanted to tell people it was a “Peter Pan” movie. It’s not a remake. It’s not the story. It takes the skeleton of the myth and then tells its own tale in a way that the [our] story just not related really to these other stories. I don’t think there was any fear that we were going to somehow make a movie that was similar to any other film. We knew that the film was going to be totally unique in every way, even though it’s working off the same myth. I don’t know. I mean, I think with all this stuff it’s like, I don’t really come from the film industry. I don’t really work with it in mind. I work sort of in a vacuum and I make the films that I want to make the way that I want to make them. That’s what I love about being a filmmaker. It’s never been an attraction to me to become a part of the broader, whatever’s going on in the industry per se if that makes sense.
Totally, but comparing this film to “Beasts” you’re using visual effects for the first time, you’re using all sorts of stuff, so you still have to reach out and talk to industry professionals. Was that process intimidating to talk about your vision to people outside the way you’ve worked?
Well, we found a very scrappy visual effects company that formed to do the film. It was an amazing group of people. They basically had an all-star cast of people that had been working in sort of big advertising firms and wanted to get out and do something creative. So, they banded together specifically to make this film. Really, as much as possible, we always try to keep our processes incredibly personal. I’m in the room with the visual effects guys, talking about the pixels. Nothing was segmented and like, “O.K., well let’s just hire this group to do this.” Everything is tactile. The way I make films, every element is affecting every other element, so everybody has to be in conversation on the journey altogether.
O.K. I want to just talk about that because I think there’s only a couple of directors of your caliber – off the top of my head – who have gone from one DP to another and their aesthetic has not changed. Your DP on this film is Sturla Brandth Grøvlen and most of his work doesn’t look anything really like “Beasts.” How did you keep that aesthetic collaborating with him?
Yeah. It’s an approach. The cinematography is dictated by principles and your approach and ideas about how a story can be captured. That conversation dictates how the film looks. Honestly, what attracted me so much to Sturla was the incredible variety in his films. Every single one of his films is captured at this incredibly high level like “Victoria’s” single shot.
I love that movie.
He made a film called “Heartstone” that was much more documentary based, handheld aesthetic. Each one was realized at such a high level. That’s something that I really look for in collaborators is, not necessarily that they do things the way that I do or the way that I’m going to ask them to work, but that they just work…his cinematography is based in ideas. You could tell that there was a vision, a thought, a logic and intentionality between the concept of how the film was shot. So when we went into this film, that concept was very much around spontaneity and around child’s POV. That would dictate an organicness. Shooting on location and not synthesizing everything, doing everything for real. When I had those conversations about how I wanted to approach the shooting of the film, he understood. And I knew that he’s such a brilliant technician that he could execute that.
By the way, did you shoot on film or on Red?
On film, yeah. On 16 millimeter. There’s very few cinematographers that still do so. The pool is kind of narrow. Who still knows how is getting smaller and smaller.
I would just be so freaked out that we just shot in the middle of a volcano and someone lost the footage you just shot.
That shit happens with digital too. It’s even worse because you’ve got a hard drive, and then you’ve got a sand storm, and then you’ve got waves crashing over the boat. The little, smallest drop of water gets in that drive and that’s dead.
How organic is your filming process? Do you storyboard or does it come about from just a shot list?
No, no. We storyboard like crazy and then none of that goes according to plan. The kind of approach, the whole design of our process is based on, and the reason no one else does things this way is because everything we do is unpredictable. It’s like, kids are unpredictable, the ocean’s unpredictable, the volcano’s unpredictable. We’re outside, the sun is unpredictable. You can’t count on anything going as you plan it. Oftentimes we would scout a location 10 times, come back and it wouldn’t look anything like it did when we were there. The beach would have just washed away or there had been a rock collapse. It’s like, “Oh that was our whole scene.” You fall back on a plan based on what the principles of that plan are. [For example,] a kid just can’t remember their line. You have to change the words Or you have to change who says the line. We’re going to give it to this kid and that screws up your 180 and you have to rethink the entire blocking of the scene in order to make it work again. It’s this combination of in the moment, spontaneous improv and shooting this film feels like an athletic event. You show up on set, your opponent is the film and the first thing that happens every day is it just clubs you in the face. Then you try to figure out how to master it while you’re dizzy and disoriented. That’s what it felt like every single day.
Do your friends say that you’re a patient person? Because I don’t know if I could deal with that. Especially with the entire cast being kids. Even though you’ve experienced it before you’re not on a soundstage where things are controlled and you can tell kids to go back to their trailers.
We’re pooping in buckets. We had some amazing bathroom-related [problems], like a kid has to take a shit and to get that kid to a bathroom, you’re down for an hour and a half with like 15 senior citizens in the middle of the ocean on a rusty boat. That’s what it was like. I don’t know if they’d say, I mean I am patient but I’m very diligent. I persevere. I don’t give up. The funny thing is, the movie took seven years [and] most of those seven years I was panicked about time. It wasn’t like, “Let’s take our time and chill.”
Meaning there wasn’t enough time?
There’s never enough time. To this day I need one more day. We always felt rushed. Every day you’re falling slightly short of what you were hoping to get and the same in the edit. Just the film was so more massive and complicated than I think probably even comes through on-screen. We just were up against that. It wasn’t a surprise, that’s how “Beasts” was. We knew creating a film with this level of volatility was going to be like that, but certainly, the culture of the set wasn’t just like, chill out, be patient. It was like a battle. It was really survival.
When did you guys shoot, 2018?
2017.
So, it took you two years to edit.
Yeah. Well, we only shot about 60 days total, but each time we moved. So we were on three different islands, Louisiana and Mexico. That took around six months because of the amount of planning and logistics each time we moved to relaunch the production, basically.
Right.
The shoot went on for a very long time. The edit was also combined with writing the music, which I also do. I’m there every moment of the sound design. Post on “Beasts” took around the same amount of time and it’s because the way that I work is every element has to be able to react to every other element until literally the last day of locking the film. Everyone is working all the time and revising endlessly. Because sound affects the cut, music affects the sound, visual effects affect all those things. So, that’s all moving and I’m rotating between those departments nonstop over the course of post, which draws it out considerably.
I mean, this is seven years of your life.
Yeah.
What in this process gives you joy then? Is it being on set? Is it being in the editing room, putting it all together? What part of this makes seven years worth it?
I look back on it and I had the best life for most of that time. I mean, making a film in this way where you’re not on a soundstage, I thought about the place in the world I most wanted to spend the next seven years of my life, and that was this Island of Montserrat which is one of the most incredible places you could ever go. Now when I go back over to show the film it’s going to be a historic celebration, nothing like this has ever happened there. I just have so many friends in these places now. I have this family of kids that are now like my surrogate children all over Louisiana, Joshua and the Caribbean. It’s an incredible adventure. It’s an incredible way to live. I really have no life outside of doing this. I don’t have other stuff going on.
You’re not doing commercials on the side.
No, nor do I have a family. This is my whole life, is this experience and making these films. Everybody I know works on these films. Everybody I care about is involved. The film is how I live, and it’s a great life. Certainly deep in post when you have been staring at a computer for two years is less that. There are certainly parts of it that I wish [would] go faster, and in the future, I’m trying to find ways to do post in Louisiana and stay at home, things that frustrate me about the process. I don’t like getting pulled away from New Orleans, where I live.
Now that you’ve made this, is this the only way you think you could work? Is the next film another, maybe not seven years, maybe four?
Yeah, but it’s not unrelated. The process is the same, I mean the next one I want to make is radically different from this, but it’s no more conventional. I think each film deserves its own, the design of how it’s going to be made should be in sync with what it’s about and what the story is. That doesn’t change. Just the nature of where I want to be and how I want to do things like I’m going to be in strange, remote places with strange, frontier people and in chaotic, dangerous, weird circumstances. That’s just what I want to be doing with my life. That’s, in a nutshell, what’s next. Obviously I want to make a lot of films in my life. I would love to make them faster, but I feel at the mercy of my films. I follow them, they don’t follow me. Where they take me is not something I ever seek to totally control.
“Wendy” opens in Los Angeles and New York on Friday.