Debra Granik comes a long way from the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, where her new film Winter’s Bone is set. The writer-director currently resides in Manhattan, but has also lived in Boston, Washington, D.C. and Maryland. The life of the mountain people depicted in her film is something new to her. But you could never tell that, based on the film’s authenticity and almost documentary-like feel.
Winter’s Bone, shot in the Ozarks, was a real challenge for Granik, who wasn’t sure she had it in her to capture the people and places and sights and sounds of the location.
“It took a lot of trips down there to get the confidence to make this,” the director admits from the comfy lobby of a Philadelphia hotel. “A flag went up at first. Initially, we thought we were not the people to make this. Things could go wrong when you are an outsider who wants to make a film about a place you don’t know.”
Based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone tells the story of Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence), a teenager who cares for her two younger brothers and mentally unstable mother in their Ozark home. The family’s home becomes endangered when Dolly’s ex-con father disappears; it seems he put their house up for collateral while in prison for selling methamphetamines. While trying to track down her father, Ree encounters a local lawman, some of the area’s residents involved in the drug trade, and her volatile uncle (John Hawkes).
“The story was magnetic to us,” says Granik of her film that won the coveted Audience Award at the most recent Sundance Film Festival. “And meeting the author meant a lot to us, and then having him introducing us to a few core ingredients gave birth to further research. We hooked up with a folk singer in this community, a sheriff, an Ozark scholar. Then we went to New York City where we decided to try an adaptation.”
After penning the script, Granik and co-writer Anne Rossellini reconnected with their “ardor for the project.”
“We still loved the protagonists,” says Granik. “Then we went back down there. Our visits down there, through careful research and having a guide, we realized we could start putting the pieces together. We worked with local actors and found a piece of land and a house that Ree Dolly could live in, and we could find a trampoline for her to play on. Our confidence in trying to coordinate the project grew as ingredients in the area were made available to us.”
Granik says that the leads came from around the country and immersed themselves in the Ozark culture. “John (Hawkes) had to listen to local people from the community. He talked to people in bars and went into them, hung out in them and got his bearings. Jen (Lawrence) comes from Kentucky. She didn’t know about that hardscrabble life, but she had a sense of things. She had a way of pronouncing stuff in the script (properly) and knew about hunting.”
The director, who got started in the industry by making educational films and health safety films in Boston and eventually attended New York University’s film program, has one previous feature under her belt. 2004’s Down to the Bone featured Vera Farmiga as a housewife and mother who has a secret drug addiction.
One wonders why Granik has now made two films about drugs, even though the problem is seen through two totally different perspectives.
“I never sought out drugs as a subject, but I do find that life circumstances brush up against drugs,” confides Granik. “It feels that drugs have helped people feel better. Alienation and economy play a part of it—it’s become almost a marvel not to do drugs. Some of the complications and life circumstances that we have in a first world country are that hard—I think it’s become very understandable how certain forms of pain relief have become ubiquitous.
“I just don’t show drugs as a party or glamorize them. I’m not interested in drugs as recreation. They play a role in terms of their part in human existence and how they try to make lives work in a safe and healthy way. So therefore they have to be taken on. I’m doing battle with them, not embracing them. It’s a hard subject matter to take on. After Down to the Bone, I figured, that’s enough. But Daniel’s book had it in there, too.”
In many ways, says Granik, drugs and, particularly the subject of meth tackled in Winter’s Bone, is the new form of moonshine.
“Iowa and Southern Missouri have had enormous meth problems,” says Granik. “Iowa’s is very severe, because one of (meth’s) ingredients was prevalent there.
“Of course, it’s not unique to the Ozarks, but it’s there. Poverty is always linked because poor families are drawn to that. Meth was very powerful when it hit in the Ozarks. The people don’t have resources to hide it (their drug problems). It’s out there like a raw sore. So, this is the new moonshine. It can be made on the black market. It can be made self-sufficiently with black market systems. It can get very elaborate.”
Granik, who is currently working on adapting a novel set in West Virginia, is elated that not only did she get to make Winter’s Bone on her own terms, but also get it distributed after its acclaimed showing at Sundance. Her and her partners stuck with the studio (Roadside Attractions) that showed interest in it before it won the big award.
In many ways, the film had reminded people of another independent success story of a few years ago, 2008’s Frozen River, which featured Melissa Leo as a hard-pressed mother who takes to smuggling immigrants across the Canadian/U.S. border to make money for her family. The film won strong reviews and garnered several awards, including two Academy Award nominations.
“That film was an excellent role model for us,” says Granik. “It played for months in theaters and gave great exposure to Melissa Leo, an actress usually in the background, who deserved a closer look. I think the same thing happened with Vera (in Down to the Bone) and we hope it will happen again now (with Jennifer Lawrence).”
One has the feeling it already is happening.