It feels fitting that the arrival of Debra Granik coincides with a rare downpour at Cannes. The director’s rough-hewn films are as detached from the aspirational sheen of the film festival as is possible, all muted greys and greens. Granik’s focus is on life in the margins, not the limelight – the daily struggle of the Americans who are not quite getting by. In her debut, Down to the Bone, it was a supermarket bagger and single mum scarred by a lifetime of cocaine abuse, played by Vera Farmiga. Then came the Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone, a harrowing yet ultimately hopeful tale of poverty, meth addiction and loss in the Missouri Ozarks that launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence.
Now comes a third feature, Leave No Trace, which stretches that theme of life on the margins to breaking point and is already being talked of as one of the year’s best releases. Adapted from Peter Rock’s survivalist novel, My Abandonment, it stars Ben Foster as an army veteran and New Zealander Thomasin McKenzie as his 13-year-old daughter. The pair live a quiet, deliberately off-grid life in a forested public park outside Portland, Oregon. They forage for mushrooms, sleep in a ramshackle camp and practice escape drills for when the authorities try to take them away. Inevitably, their unconventional way of life is threatened, prompting the pair to head off deeper into the wilderness of the Pacific north-west, embarking “physically and emotionally on their own Oregon trail”, as Granik puts it.
While Foster is excellent as the bruised, introverted Will, it is McKenzie, as Tom, who steals the film. Headstrong, generous and smart, she is a tomboy in the old-fashioned sense of the word, says Granik, when it “meant ability, moxie, pluck”. In this sense, Tom shares a lot in common with Ree, Lawrence’s character in Winter’s Bone, a young woman whose self-reliant, can-do attitude stretched to catching, skinning and cooking her own squirrels.
Granik hopes that younger viewers will see Leave No Trace. The film, she says, celebrates the idea of “teen women [being] shown a role where they’re using a lot of smarts to survive. They’re not valued in the story because of some kind of sexual prowess or attributes. They’re not there only because of their physicality. Their mind matters.”
I had half-expected Granik to resemble her heroines – tough, taciturn and direct. She is anything but. Wide-eyed, genial and slightly hippyish, she responds to questions with loose, digressive answers crammed with detail about everything from Nordic folk tales to the radical environmental group Earth First. This same sense of detail is present in all Granik’s work. If her films feel lived-in and authentic, it is because of the hard graft that has gone into making them that way. She and her longtime producer, Anne Rosellini, spent years on the road researching Winter’s Bone, concerned about how it might look for a coastal liberal (Granik grew up in a well-off Washington DC suburb) to be directing a film about impoverished midwesterners.
She continued that process on Leave No Trace, carrying out what she calls “reconnaissance” – for example “going to a truck stop and asking truckers how they would deal with a young woman coming up to them. We feel like investigative journalists at times,” she says. “We’re seeking informants. We’re learning about locations, processes to provide knowledge that we don’t have.”
Granik’s reconnaissance often takes her into forgotten or ignored corners of the US. Another of her discoveries was Ron Hall, a Vietnam veteran and biker whom she met while scouting for cast members for Winter’s Bone. She gave Hall a small but significant role in that film and later made a documentary about him. Stray Dog follows Hall on cross-country motorcycle rides and volunteer work counselling veterans with PTSD. Hall inspired an interest in Granik about how trauma and depression manifest themselves among veterans, people who have seen horrors that the rest of us can’t fathom, and for whom reverting back to a “normal” existence isn’t always possible.
Those issues manifest themselves in Leave No Trace, where it quickly becomes clear that Will is escaping what Granik calls “the amplified chatter of the digital era. It’s something that he immediately said: ‘This is clogging my circuitry.’ It’s similar with incarceration or other things where people come back to a world of such rapidity in the changes that are happening.”
Of course, for many vets the solution lies in the bottle or, more commonly, pills. Opioid abuse is rife among US veterans, who are twice as likely to die from overdoses as non-veterans. It’s a shadow that looms over Leave No Trace. Will himself isn’t an addict, but contributes to the cycle of addiction, selling the medication he is prescribed for his PTSD on to other vets.
“One of the solutions [federal agencies came up with to the PTSD crisis] was to heavily medicate people – as if that could make it go away,” she says, shaking her head. “You can’t just pill away injuries that go deep in someone. They don’t just stop those feelings from existing.”
This thought leads Granik to confront the questions that seem to haunt all her films. “Why is the US the biggest drug market in the world?” she asks. “Why is there this hunger for medicating? And what is so hard and dispiriting about some of the lifestyles that are promulgated in this country that requires people to medicate like this?” As she pauses, it’s clear Granik doesn’t have the answers to these questions yet. You suspect she is unlikely to stop until she finds them.
Leave No Trace premieres at Sundance London on 3 June and is released on 29 June.
