Debra Granik: ​‘This film is about the dif­fer­ence between want and need’

The Amer­i­can writer/​director Debra is not some­one who punch­es out movies at a rate of knots: she slow-cooks them, and deliv­ers them only when they’re good and ready. It has been the best part of a decade since she intro­duced the world to Jen­nifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, a shock­ing por­trait of hard­scrab­ble lives and sys­temic abuse in Appalachia.

With doc­u­men­tary Stray Dog, about a pup­py-lov­ing bik­er, released in 2014, she’s back with a new fic­tion fea­ture, Leave No Trace, about a father and daugh­ter attempt­ing to life a life dis­con­nect­ed from the grid. Will, played by Ben Fos­ter has set up a tiny idyll in a pub­lic park in which he lives with his teenage daugh­ter, Tom (Thomasin McKen­zie). The film charts their jour­ney after they are moved on by author­i­ties and Will remains deter­mined to achieve a per­son­al dream of total free­dom and isolation.

LWLies: Have you ever had any per­son­al expe­ri­ences liv­ing out­side the sys­tem? Is it a notion that appeals to you?

Granik: I’m very inter­est­ed in it, though I’ve nev­er done it. I admire peo­ple who do it. I’m curi­ous as to how they make it work. I want to know the deci­sions behind their choice to breach or sep­a­rate. A lot of tenets of why peo­ple do it are view attrac­tive to me. I’m not usu­al­ly drawn to ideas of extreme sur­vival­ism that requires a mili­tia to be asso­ci­at­ed with it. That stuff brings up despair­ing thoughts. I’m inter­est­ed in the idea that peo­ple can make this pow­er­ful deci­sion. For exam­ple, this vibrat­ing, ampli­fied chat­ter of the dig­i­tal world is impact­ing my abil­i­ty to think my own thoughts. I love the strength of char­ac­ter of some­one that choos­es to be apart from that. Why do they have that spe­cial insight into them­selves? Or how are they okay with mak­ing a deci­sion that goes against the grain?

The film says a lot, indi­rect­ly, about the peo­ple who are obsessed with this dig­i­tal space.

It some­times makes me thinks about that sto­ry of the emper­or who had no clothes. I love that char­ac­ter who final­ly calls it out. There’s some­one who dares to tell the truth. I’ve always been attract­ed to whis­tle blow­ers – the per­son who final­ly decides to say it. They are trea­sured people.

That’s inter­est­ing, as the char­ac­ter of Will is pre­sent­ed in a very objec­tive way. You nei­ther endorse nor dis­cour­age what he’s doing.

I don’t know whether what he’s doing is good. It’s hard from him. He lives in the wet and the damp. And it’s unten­able as he has set up camp on pub­lic land. Not that I’m like, ​‘no, no, no.’. It’s more like there’s no way to sanc­tion what he does. At any time, he can be eject­ed from that park. It makes me won­der: to chose to live an alter­na­tive lifestyle, you real­ly have to have a spe­cial tick­et to do so. You have to have finan­cial resources to chose your lifestyle. Like every­thing, you need resource to say you want to life with­out resource. I didn’t feel like I could adju­di­cate. But I want­ed to use a warm-heart­ed, anthro­po­log­i­cal approach rather than cold­ly sci­en­tif­ic. It was all about observ­ing. I’m try­ing to see how rather than whether some­thing is good or bad.

The def­i­n­i­tion of free­dom in Amer­i­ca is a hot-but­ton dis­cus­sion point right now. Do you think the film offers its own def­i­n­i­tion of what it means to seek freedom?

He could feel like he’s free in that park, but he’s not free of his night ter­rors. Even in that idyl­lic sit­u­a­tion. His search is to cre­ate a sig­nif­i­cant hedge of pro­tec­tion from that which alien­ates him, like con­sumer and dig­i­tal cul­ture. It asks: how much seren­i­ty could a per­son cre­ate for them­selves? They enjoy books, they enjoy knowl­edge, the enjoy learn­ing skills, hon­ing those skills. In those actions, there’s free­dom of how they spend their time. He is real­ly marked by an expe­ri­ence, which is his sol­dier­ing. And we have plat­i­tudes for that: you can run but you can’t hide. Mean­ing that some­things he can’t offload. There’s a ghost in there who he lives with.

The pres­ence of his daugh­ter, Tom, is pre­sent­ed as both a bless­ing and a curse. It’s inter­est­ing to see such an ambiva­lent por­trait of fam­i­ly. Does a fam­i­ly pre­vent us from achiev­ing ulti­mate freedom?

She dri­ves mean­ing in his life. Being her teacher is impor­tant to him. She grounds him in an impor­tant way – she pro­tects him from a soli­tude that can close in on him. It’s a com­pan­ion­ship that does work. It puts him, in the logis­ti­cal sense, at the con­stant risk of expo­sure. Trav­el­ling with a minor makes you more vis­i­ble. It makes peo­ple more con­cerned about you. You are more reach­able by the law. Which dic­tates that the wel­fare state will have an impor­tant rela­tion­ship to chil­dren. So yes, it’s a dou­ble-edged thing. It is an imped­i­ment for him doing only what he wants. To be a decent per­son, he has to take into con­sid­er­a­tion her desires, her asser­tion of will. He doesn’t want to squash her at all. He wants to instil his way of life in her.

Where do you feel that Will sits on the polit­i­cal spectrum?

He has become an opt-out­er. He’s alien­at­ed. He’s def­i­nite­ly not cen­trist, as he’d be liv­ing in a more tra­di­tion­al way. I would say that he is some­one who aligns him­self with eas­i­er the­o­rists and philoso­phers. In the book [‘My Aban­don­ment’ by Peter Rock, upon which this is based] he quot­ed Hen­ry David Thore­au and Walden. How lit­tle can I exist on and remain sane? How can my thoughts go to high­er places? It was inter­est­ed to me that the advent of the tele­graph occurred when Thore­au was try­ing to extri­cate himself.

The first telegram came through and it said that Princess Anne of Bel­gium has just had a birth­day. Some­thing he nev­er need­ed to know. Come the world wars, of course vital infor­ma­tion is being exchanged. Will is in that tra­di­tion. He’s ask­ing a lot of ques­tions about the mean­ing of his life. He’s try­ing to dis­cern the dif­fer­ence between want and need. He feels a lot of worth and com­pe­ten­cy by being able to achieve prim­i­tive skills. Mas­tery over the impor­tant hier­ar­chy of needs, being able to pro­vide food and shel­ter. Not sewing your own buck­skin, but know­ing what you need. He was try­ing to sim­pli­fy, which gives more room to appre­ci­ate oth­er things.

Unlike far right sep­a­ratists, Will seems like some­one who has no inter­est in bring­ing peo­ple towards his cause.

There’s a beau­ti­ful doc­u­men­tary about this sub­ject called Sol­diers in Hid­ing which was made by a British crew in the mid-’80s. It’s on YouTube. And it shows about 11 vari­a­tions of Will. There were fam­i­lies who would have one mem­ber who was liv­ing alone, unde­tect­ed and he would come back for a cer­tain amount of time, and they would leave him food in a bag. Some of them felt very per­ma­nent­ly unable to rebal­ance, or par­tic­i­pate in any nor­ma­tive func­tions at all. This doc­u­men­tary is a very beau­ti­ful set of por­traits I think.

Do you think there’s a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic feel to Leave No Trace?

Some peo­ple have not­ed that, but I was very much try­ing to tell a sto­ry in the here and now. There doesn’t need to be an apoc­a­lypse for some­one to oper­ate differently.

When in the process of mak­ing the film was Don­ald Trump elect­ed? Did it have any effect on what you were doing?

It absolute­ly did. I guess it hap­pened when we were work­ing on the last draft. I think where it played out the most is just that I had a desire to see peo­ple being good to one anoth­er. I start­ed to live with this notion that if peo­ple can be bad to one anoth­er, they will. I don’t know if that was Trump plus the inter­net or fake news or any of that. It’s the idea that many find it plea­sur­able to lend a hand or help some­one else out – I start­ed to be very hap­py in the research of the film when I dis­cov­ered this to be true.

Leave No Trace is released 22 June. Read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review.