‘Leave No Trace’ Director Debra Granik Discusses Her Film’s Unique Script And Time’s Up [Interview]

When Debra Granik went to Sundance with her first feature film, 2004’s “Down to the Bone,” she made her first major stride in what would become a robust, acclaimed directorial career. Her 2010 sophomore feature “Winter’s Bone” rocketed Jennifer Lawrence into stardom and garnered a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars, with critics noting Granik’s unique penchant for contemplative, humanist filmmaking. Her latest release, “Leave No Trace,” is no exception.

“Leave No Trace” follows teenager Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) and her father, Will (Ben Foster). After a traumatic turn in the military, Will has raised Tom in the wilderness of an Oregon state. When their lifestyle comes under scrutiny, Tom and Will must grapple with their own personal definitions of growth, family, and home. The film, Granik’s third feature to debut at Sundance, was an all-over critical success, with our own Jordan Ruimy calling it “a universal, unforgettable experience.” As colored by the soft greens of the forest as it is by its leads’ outstanding performances, “Leave No Trace” is a beautiful exercise in narrative softness.

When you meet Debra Granik, it becomes immediately clear how she’s made so many genius stories back-to-back. She’s an ebulliant, enthusiastic presence who can cram philosophical platitudes into otherwise mundane sentences. Though there are a few years between each of her projects, Granik insists she wishes she could give her work more care and attention (though how that’s even possible, after you see a film as deftly-crafted as “Leave No Trace,” is beyond me). Before our interview in Manhattan, she stops to take a call—something major has just happened in the documentary she’s currently working on, and she’s torn between the publicity for “Leave No Trace” and the addictive chase of her next creative project.

Before she ran off to work on another universally beloved film, I was lucky enough to grab her for a revelatory chat about her latest release’s unique script, her fascination with addiction storylines, and her reaction to the Time’s Up movement.

It seems like you tend to take some time in between your projects. What have you been up to?
No, I never take time, that’s the problem! It’s always overlapping. There’s a very bad syndrome that we all recognize in our office, which is that you look at the stovetop and all four burners are on, and nothing’s getting finished. And then there’ll be these awful times when you’re like, “Oh, I’ll stir this, and, oh, that’s burning.” To get the best of this documentary gently recorded, I would be absolutely full-time. I would not be gallivanting tonight or tomorrow to Portland, even though I want to see the cast and crew and thank them and be with them and have us see the film together, I would not be doing…I would be full time on finishing the doc.

Speaking of Portland, I can imagine what a minefield, production-wise, this film must have been. Your stars were working with survival experts and you were actually setting up camps in this vast park, you’re also going to Christmas tree farms—it’s very clear that you have documentary experience when you watch this film. Do you have any stories about immersing yourself and the actors in these communities and those experiences?
The Christmas tree farm is a good jump-off. As we drove out into sort of the fertile, agricultural part of the valley that extends below Portland, one of the major industries is Christmas tree [farming]. Part of what’s tragic about Oregon, with all its beauty, is it’s an extractive state. They have to harvest everything, and it can also leave them in abject cycles of poverty when the price of Christmas trees or lumber plummets. There’s the idea that you have to destroy everything you’ve got that’s beautiful or harvest it all. But the Christmas tree [farms], a lot of them are family-owned to this day, and it was a truly big part of the topography to see these rows. After the very anarchic form of the forest, to see these very rigid rows of trees that looked so much like soldiers, and to know that they all have to be chopped down. On a photographic level, there’s a certain kind of violence in it. When the rows are felled and the body of the tree heaves down, and then it’s wrapped up sort of in a body bag if you will, there’s a lot of imagery—especially when the helicopters helped pull up enormous wads of trees and then plunked them down, it felt like a militaristic procedure.

Right, and those helicopter noises are very visceral for Ben’s character.
Yes. So it was a confluence where the distillation of photography plus the abundance of this reality—it would be a job that he would find difficult, that would be a trigger.

Were those all actors on the farm?
No. The real tree farmer who was showing Ben the techniques, Bob [Werfelman], he was so wonderful. And then he and his partner, Dee, their monologues were so outstanding. Another story that could be a whole film: The men that worked the farm were a family that had come up years ago, a Mexican family. It was like eight brothers, but their father had first worked with Bob. The sons are all adults now, so these men’s lives have been inextricably linked for the last, like, 35 years. The convulsive, ugly head of complex immigration discourse was rising as we were shooting and I was like, “Wow, these are the stories that we just don’t know. The lives of Americans and Mexicans so profoundly linked.” I love being informed by people in the field, people that are living certain experiences who can then demonstrate or bring to a film that which they know, and that which we don’t know.

And the beekeeper was another example. Susan Chernick, who plays herself, that was something that had come into the script over some research—actually research from southern Missouri. Bees do migrate, you know, and beekeeping was something that was making me happy about very different swaths of Americans. I’m kind of excited by any pursuit that crosses class lines, and beekeeping is one of those, which I love. 4-H, in fact, is one of those as well, which interests me a lot. And the beekeepers trained Tom to be able to be near the bees, and then Susan divined that Tom would be someone that could touch the bees, and she said, “Tom is calm enough, let’s do a trial in my backyard.” She had Tom put her hands out—we have the footage of this test—and then, with gloves on, she puts the bees on, and she just watches how they respond, and it was a lovely moment. It turned into a very lyrical moment in the film, and it was infused by the beekeeper. That scene was shaped and inflected with all her knowledge. Her lines were her lines. We had to run the scene quite a few times, and we listened to her lines and then selected, very carefully, the ones we thought had some cool ideas behind them.