After the acclaim of her sophomore feature film “Winter’s Bone,” writing a treatment with an eye on the director’s chair for a Pippi Longstocking movie isn’t exactly what we had envisioned for Debra Granik.
Despite her obvious strength at depicting female protagonists, and with all due respect to the classic children’s heroine, the story of Pippi isn’t one we pictured Granik taking on, having previously tackled the drug addict drama “Down To The Bone” and last year’s Ozark coming-of-age tale “Winter’s Bone.” However, a new project much better suited to the helmer — at least in our minds — has cropped up. Last month, production company Trio Films revealed that the director has another film in the works, described as “a documentary on U.S. veterans in the South.”
Granik has now discussed the project in greater detail revealing that the doc will, in fact, focus on the actor who played the patriarch character in “Winter’s Bone” and (we presume) briefly visited our protagonist, Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), in the barn before Teardrop (John Hawkes) came to her rescue. The director only met the actor — one of the many locals cast in the movie — during the film’s production, but uncovered that he “writes extensively, suffers from PTSD, and belongs to a biker’s church, where people go and stand before God in their leather [and] there’s every zone of tolerance there you would ever imagine.'” Sounds like a fairly interesting subject to delve into, and at the very least a more substantial work for Granik to tackle.
Unfortunately there is no word, however, on the progress of a gestating road trip film written by Granik which we hope is still being developed. The helmer previously noted the project as one “dear to [her] heart” and one that would feature “rich and convoluted photography of the United States, several different states, on route to Mexico. It could be maybe a love song to North America and the complicatedness of our lives here.” Still, it seems Granik has a few options on her plate and we’ll be excited to see which direction she chooses next.
