The Sundance Film Festival may no longer be the indie haven that turned countless amateur filmmakers into star directors overnight in the '90s, but every year at least one unknown film slips out, turning a project funded on credit cards and dreams into an award contender. 

This year that film is Beasts Of the Southern Wild, the first feature of co-writer/director Benh Zeitlin and his art collective, Court 13. The film is a child’s eye fantasy view of Louisiana eccentricity. It’s told from the perspective of the of a six-year-old girl named Hushpuppy (remarkably portrayed by the untrained Quvenzhané Wallis) who lives amongst makeshift shanty towns with her father Wink, floats through the bayou when their community is flooded, and has strange childish visions of being chased by gigantic beasts. 

It’s a remarkable debut that also received praise at Cannes and has earned the first-time filmmaker comparisons to the likes of Terrence Malick. With the film opening in Canada on Friday, TORO spoke with burgeoning young director Zeitlin about the grass roots creation of his unexpected breakout movie. 

Where did this idea originate, I gather it was based on a play by your co-writer Lucy Alibar? 

Yeah, it actually started differently than that. The play came second. It emerged out of making a short film and I was interested in telling a story about holdouts in Louisiana and what it’s like to stand by your land in places that are under threat. Then I kind of found this town at the bottom of Louisiana that became an inspiration for the movie. The play came in as something else that I was working on at the same time and suddenly realizing the connection between a daughter losing her father and a community losing its place, I started to feel like I was writing the same story in two different venues and decided to try and combine the two thoughts into one. That’s when it really started to take shape. 

What’s the attraction to Louisiana for you? It has an almost mythical quality in how you present it in the movie.

I think it does have that quality as a place. I’m from New York and moved down there six years ago. It’s just a place that blows my mind and surprises me more than anywhere else I’ve been. You can turn a corner and see something you’ve never seen before. I’ve just fallen in love with the place. But I definitely see it, for me, as almost a place that I had written about before I got there. It’s like walking into a place from your dreams. 

How did the community respond to you filming this story down there as an outsider?

It was never an issue. The film was extremely collaborative with the community. We had many people from the area working on the film and acting in the film. It’s not a piece of realism or trying to expose some kind of political message about the people. It was always intended to be an adventure movie made in a way that was extremely collaborative. The culture where we shot is rural and extremely hospitable. We were invited in everywhere, given tours, and really became connected with that place.

The story has an almost fairytale quality, what interested you in that approach?

I wanted to tell a story that could travel. It wasn’t something that I ever wanted to connect in a harsh way to the region in a way that no one from the outside would understand. We wanted to take these themes and things that we were inspired by Louisiana and paint it in very broad strokes so that it becomes something like Huck Finn or John Henry; those kind stories that translate everywhere and have a certain kind of American quality. We wanted to get outside of the regional politics and preconceptions about New Orleans and Louisiana. 

Do you see it as a fantasy film or are those exaggerated elements more the product of a child’s imagination?

Well, watching it as an adult it’s a different reality, so in that way it’s fantastical. For me, it’s about being six and the experience of this little girl who is not really able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. For her, its all the same thing. I just thought back to being that age and having imaginary things that I considered to be very real. There’s certainly a heightened reality in the film, but for me that’s just the perspective of the character. 

How much of Hushpuppy came from the actress Quvenzhané Wallis since she was so young and inexperienced?

It was a real collaboration and that was something that we did with almost every character. We did tons of interviews before we started shooting where I would ask her what she thought about certain things in the film. Her theories about animals, her theories about what certain things meant, and how they worked. We incorporated a lot of that language and material into the character. We would always ask her how she would say lines and even sit her in front of the computer and let her change the dialogue so that she was happy with what she was saying. It was very much a collaborative process between us, but it was still very much in the character that we wrote. She’s not playing herself. It’s a performance. 

Was the filmmaking process that fluid, collaborative, and improvisational at all times?

Yes. I mean most of that is preproduction, but it is very different from the way a normal movie is made where you have a script that you’re trying to execute. While we were casting and visiting locations, we were writing the script and rewriting constantly. There was a very fluid relationship between the elements we found and what was shot.  

Were you apprehensive at all about working with entirely untrained locals in your like Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry (who plays her father)?

We were definitely terrified [laughs]. We had always planned to mix professional actors and non-professional actors in the film. Once we realized that we could shoot it all with non-professionals it was exciting, but scary. Whether they are trained actors or not I would always want whoever is playing a role to bring a part of themselves to the character. We go through a process where we make sure that everything a character does feels authentic and realistic to the person playing the part. That’s something that I would do regardless of who it is. And with Dwight especially, his life was an incredible inspiration for the script. He held out during Katrina and has a seven-year-old girl. Many of the things that he did and actions that he took were written into the film and improved the script in massive ways. 

Did this collaborative approach come out of the Court 13 collective?

Definitely. It’s something that we’ve always done with our art department and location team, giving each person who works on the film a tremendous amount of agency to not just execute someone else’s vision but express their own creativity on screen. We really brought that to the performances as well this time. 

Where did the Court 13 group come from and do you plan on continuing to work through that collective?

That’s definitely the plan. It’s fun making films this way. It sort of started with an animated film that I made while I was still in school. It was a community of artists who grew up around doing things in this way, trying to tell big stories built by hand, gluing and stitching everything together. We also try to live the story in a very visceral way. So all of those ideas inspired the group. 

How did you create the beasts? It was so nice to see physical effects like that but I’d imagine that was a challenge with your fairly limited resources.

Some of it is a secret. I went to our creature designer and said, “We need to do this in a way that reflects Hushpuppy.” She doesn’t have a laptop, there’s no technology there. So we didn’t want to come up with a digital solution to the problem. What I told them to do was to shoot the beast with live animals. That became a mandate and they found a way to pull it off. There’s digital work in there to retouch things or create textures or hide seams, but about 85 per cent of the stuff we did entirely in camera inspired by ’80s effects. We tried to take a very old school approach to the effects. 

Was it a challenge in general to create a film of this scale based on the budget?

Yeah, we were stretching every single penny and asking every favour you could ever ask for from every friend. But even so, our financiers are really incredible. They had no financial agenda. They’re a non-profit company and didn’t care about box office. So they let us make creative choices, take huge risks, and create scale without having giant honeywagons and all the things that you normally need to make a film. 

More: TORO reviews Beasts of the Southern Wild