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Director Jean-Marc Vallée on location while filming Wild. Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures |
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Vallée at the TIFF Wild press conference. Photo: Wireimage / Getty for TIFF. |
The words Vallée recites from the author’s story—an
immensely popular book that brings high expectations that the film gamely
meets—offer fitting words to summarize how best to approach an adaptation of
such high esteem. How wild it must have been for the artist and his cast to create a way to be respectful of Strayed’s work while also being loyal
and true to the film experience. The result is a beautiful memory mosaic and arguably the film of the year.
Vallée talks about Wild
with the same fever of excitement that we do, so the conversation easily slides
into Wild’s delicate balance of form
and character following Vallée’s introduction with the song. “Sometimes that’s
a ghost song. Sometimes she’s humming it, sometimes she’s singing it,” Vallée
says of “El Condor Pasa” as he explains how Cheryl provides the key source for
music in the film. The song has a “mystical quality,” Vallée says as it
accompanies Cheryl’s mother, Bobbi (a radiant Laura Dern), along the trail.
Reese Witherspoon and director Jean-Marc Vallee filming on location for Wild. Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures |
I ask Vallée about my
favourite part of Wild--the editing--and he explains how he shoots the film
with the cutting in mind. (Vallée edits the film under the pseudonym John Mac
McMurphy along with collaborator Martin Pensa.) He says he explores ways on set
to create a language for the story using the fluidity of the camera and the
bodies of his actors. “I knew I was going to have fun with the editing. Cinema
is a big toy and we’re all kids,” he says. The element of play largely
permeates the film through the camera’s rapport with Laura Dern, and that the
element of the mother following and accompanying Cheryl on the trail furthers
the mythical quality of the music and memories that fuel Cheryl along her
journey.
Vallée adds that the improvisation with Dern came naturally
during the shoot. In fact, he recalls that he and Dern first brought Bobbi to
life when Dern came for a make-up test while he was shooting with Witherspoon
on the PCT, and he invited her to film some material while they waited for
Witherspoon. “Maybe I’ll use your ghost on the trail,” he recalls saying to
Dern as they ad-libbed ten to twelve shots throughout the shoot that appear in
the final cut of the film. Many of these haunting cutaways to
Bobbi make Dern’s character an ever-present guardian angel throughout the film
as her relationship with Cheryl brings the film to its ultimate catharsis.
“It’s nice to be creative on the spot,” Vallée adds. “You gotta plan, you gotta
structure, but you know that that fuckin’ thing has to be as emotional as the
material.” He cites one particular flashback scene where Dern jumps in a puddle
and splashes the kids as one scene they improvised while waiting for Witherspoon and it’s
one of the candid moments in which Bobbi’s effusive lust for life gives Wild its heart.
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Laura Dern as Bobbi in Wild. Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures |
Dern, sporting a cup of peppermint tea (with honey), joins
the party after Vallée moves to the next round of festival speed dating. Dern
brings to the table the same warmth and spirit that she injects into Wild, and the conversation flows like a
group chat at over coffee. The actress speaks as warmly about Vallée as the
director does about her, referring to her Wild
helmer as a “gentle giant.”
Dern says she relishes shoots like Wild in which the creation of a film and a character plays out as
something collaborative and spontaneous. She recalls the moments where Vallée
excitedly invited her to shoot some footage while they waited for Reese to get
ready (a happy trend, it seems…) and she reminisces about the Wild shoots in her best Quebecois
accent, playing the role of Jean-Marc Vallée, laughing, “Oh, Reese isn’t ready.
We have five minutes. Let’s go shoot with Laura!”
Dern praises Vallée’s active collaboration with the cast and
crew, especially cinematographer Yves Bélanger, “the great duo from Montréal!” she laughs comfortably before
sipping more tea and elaborating about the experience of working with a
filmmaker who is both a director and an editor. "It’s one thing to have a great
director, she says, “but it’s another thing to have a great editor and
director. The way he weaves memory and in a non-linear way—because people like
stories done bald with a beginning, and a middle, and an end—but that’s not the
way memory comes to us. And he played with that so beautifully and cut together
a majority of everything I did with the kids. It’s in pieces and you really
feel the mother.”
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Laura Dern (left) and Reese Witherspoon (right) star in Wild. Photo: Fox Searchlight Pictures. |
“You get very protective,” says Dern as she explains how
taking on characters both real and imaginary surely sets the projects apart. “All
our improvisation was to get to a line Cheryl said,” notes Dern, as she recalls
parts of the film such as Bobbi’s query about “zipless fucks” or the splashing
scene Vallée remembers as part of their process of finding Wild and Bobbi through their own journey with the character. “If I
didn’t spend as much time with Cheryl as I did,” Dern continues, “and hadn’t
combed over the book, and the same with Jean-Marc, it would not have been fair
to do what we did… To implant yourself into that experience… you just want
everyone to feel that love and gratitude that she [Bobbi] seemed to find in
life.”
The mother roles of Wild
and The Fault in Our Stars couldn’t
be more different, but Dern laughs loudly and infectiously as she recalls the
wildly disparate mothers she’s played throughout her career. “The only time
I’ve been a mother in a movie, I’m, like, high on spray paint and pregnant with
my kid and I don’t know where they are,” she jokes while mentioning some of her
memorable characters in Citizen Ruth
and Rambling Rose. “If I’m pregnant,
it’s a disaster. I’ve never really had it together. I’ve always played girls,
even arrested development girls. Even on the show I did for HBO [Enlightened] it was like playing a 19-year-old. I feel like it’s the first time I’ve played women and mothers, and
that was a beautiful experience.”
Dern, who has two children herself, says that her work this year with Wild and The Fault in Our Stars really marks a shift in roles in her career. Playing such strong mother characters in both films, Dern says, informed each other in ways of considering how herself as a mother. The gift of being a mother both onscreen and off, she says, is “offering the wisdom that we get from knowing this particular kind of love that is like nothing else. Such different people and places and spaces, and when it came to Wild it came desperately trying to be her mother.”
Dern, who has two children herself, says that her work this year with Wild and The Fault in Our Stars really marks a shift in roles in her career. Playing such strong mother characters in both films, Dern says, informed each other in ways of considering how herself as a mother. The gift of being a mother both onscreen and off, she says, is “offering the wisdom that we get from knowing this particular kind of love that is like nothing else. Such different people and places and spaces, and when it came to Wild it came desperately trying to be her mother.”
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Cheryl Strayed and Laura Dern at the Wild Red Carpet at TIFF.
Credit: George Pimentel, WireImage/Getty for TIFF
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Dern speaks very passionately about the mother-daughter
relationship of Wild and talks
excitedly about seeing the film as an addition to a changing landscape of films
with strong female protagonists. There’s an understandable hint of frustration
amidst the enthusiasm, though, as she notes that films like Wild are part of a cycle. “It’s
interesting for all of us movie lovers because we know it existed before,” Dern
says of a filmscape with strong women. “The only sad news is that we have to
keep circling back to where Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck were. We had it in
the 30s and 40s and we lost in the 50s, and then we got it again in the late
60s and 70s. You know, people were in line for Klute and An Unmarried Woman
and we fell in love with those women with no judgement… and then we lost it
again! So, clearly, we’re getting it back. The good news/bad news is that it
took commerce to get it back because those movies made money…” Wild handily has commerce on its side as
the megahit book almost inevitably guarantees a ready-made audience. If
audiences respond to the film just as strongly as they do the book, which they
seem to be judging by the enthusiastic reactions at TIFF, then Wild joins fellow 2014 films like The Fault in Our Stars, Maleficent, and Gone Girl to show that there is indeed an audience for female-driven
films.
Dern’s candid take on Wild
echoes one of the thoughts that Vallée offers during his portion of
the conversation. Dern says she looks forward to the day when films like Wild are merely films and not solely
“women’s movies,” and Vallée makes a similar point when a journalist at the
table asks what it was like making a female-driven film after the comparatively
male-driven films of his career. “No, I’m not a girl,” he observes with good
humour before joking that the inevitable reaction of making Wild might be a question that he’s
coming out. “I related to the material, just like the actresses,” he says openly and honestly.
Vallée continues and says that he lost his mother to cancer
two years prior to making Wild and
that the film was a way of paying tribute to these strong women. “I just wanted
to be a part of it and tell this great story… Cheryl’s mother was just like my
mother, [imitates character] ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to work out, trust God,
trust life,’” he muses while conveying that any material is essentially accessible
to any artist, reader, or viewer, regardless of gender if one gets to the universal essence of the story.
The importance of Wild’s
place in the journey of bringing strong female characters to the screen
couldn’t be more evident in the parallels that Vallée and Dern offer while
reflecting upon the adaptation's accomplishments. “For women, I couldn’t be
prouder,” says Dern. “I’ve never seen a women—nor been part of a film where it
ends with a woman—with no man, no job, no money, no family, and it’s a happy
ending… and that’s such a paradigm shift, which is great but it isn’t always
the ending.” Vallée makes a similar sentiment as the conversation returns to
the mystical chords of Simon & Garfunkel that offer an overture to the
session and guide Bobbi and Cheryl’s spirits through Wild. He remarks on why he didn’t include the first line of the
song, saying, “Her words were the best way to end the film, ‘How wild it was to
let it be’. And if you think about it, this film is about a woman, who has no
man, who is not defining herself by a man and their relationship. She has no
money, no job, and doesn’t know shit what to do. That’s the book. ‘How wild it
was to let it be.’”
Wild opens in theatres beginning December 5th
from Fox Searchlight Pictures.
(It opens in Ottawa Dec. 25th.)
(It opens in Ottawa Dec. 25th.)