ROUND-TABLE: 'Winter's Bone' director Debra Granik

Rest assured that, come awards season, Winter's Bone will be the one to watch. The film possesses a grace, a raw sort of beauty, that one would not ordinarily expect from a movie whose main character has a name like Ree Dolly. Winter's Bone director Debra Granik clearly had no desire to make a movie that would conform to expectations, however, and thank god. The film (based on the novel of the same name by Daniel Woodrell) tells the story of the aforementioned Ree, a poverty-stricken Ozarks teenager in charge of two younger siblings, who goes searching for her meth-cooking absentee father when she finds out that he has posted their family's land for his bail and that they're liable to lose all they have if he skips his court date. Granik here talks about her beautiful film and the assembly thereof.

While tackling this project, I understand, you went down South to talk with the author of the original novel. What did you pick up from being down there?
I think the first thing that hit me hard was that the Ozarks are a very distinct region of the country. I assumed as a coastal person, since everyone has a satellite dish and MTV and hyperculture is just spreading, that maybe there would be nothing left of this special region. It’s a hill-and-hollow location, and they say hill locations have what’s almost a protected boundary: things are preserved longer, meaning certain kinds of music, certain kinds of dialects. I found that to be true, and I was delighted by that. You know, I couldn’t initially figure out why there was a movement to make it a heritage location in the United States, and being down there I got that. I really did understand. I feel like I come from…

You come from near D.C., right?
Well, yeah, but it’s the suburbs, so I almost feel like I come from nowhere, you understand? So it was a very strange feeling to be in my own country and see that, oh my god, music is played at home daily, and it’s not a cliché, it’s not a legend, it’s actually happening in front of my eyes. There were phrases I had never heard of—a kind of off-hand poetry, if you will, a really specific economic language used to communicate certain things with words that had never entered my vocabulary. I found out that one English teacher allows people to write their essays and she’ll circle words and write “OZ” next to them. She won’t say that it’s wrong; she’ll say, “This is Ozarks dialect. Just so you know, students, this is Ozarks dialogue, and it’s not standard English. I’m not dogging you for it; I love your essay, but, just so you know, you’re using phrases—”

“—that most people wouldn’t understand.”
Exactly. And most of her students don’t necessarily travel outside the Ozarks, even to this day.

Do you have a favorite Ozarks phrase?
Oh, god… one thing that was really powerful to me was this notion of rising above your raising. And “ought not ask for what oughta be offered”—that was interesting to me. [laughs] The phrase—well, god, I tried to deploy “come the nut-cuttin’” for a whole year. I was like, “That is a potent phrase!” I’m not always sure I know what it means, I’ve got to go fact-check that, but it was interesting to me. I didn’t feel that I’d ever had those bullets of language at my disposal. I’d had phrases that I would pick up that had become fads or whatnot; having grown up partly in Massachusetts as well, I didn’t find out until many years later that not everyone says “wicked”, you know? But I’d grown up hearing those phrases in my teens and whatnot. So I thought that was a very rich part of the Ozarks, that there were these salient differences that were novel to me, so my ears perked up and my eyes were very open. And the last thing people do know about the region is that geologically it’s just extraordinary. The hills and hollows are very sensual—rolling hills are a very gentle kind of landscape—and then it’s got this crazy scene underneath, underground, which is a huge amount of caves. Both spectacular, terrestrial caves and just many, many properties have caves. Then the underground rivers… the history of the geology was that we had this huge amount of underground rivers, so that’s what carved this whole subterranean world. The people love their caves, love to explore them, and the caves have their own history, so I was looking at this land that had this above-ground world as well as this underground mystery. I was dazzled by the area.

I’m just trying to picture what it must look like during the rest of the year because the film was set during the winter and it astonished me how harsh the landscape looked.
Well, the hardscrabble is prominent. That rocky terrain means that it was never really fertile for agriculture, and that means that there will be really dogged attempts to make money off of land that doesn’t give easily, so people have to be extra resourceful. One other trait that I think is revered is an extreme form of frugality, and that’s another thing that makes their culture seem strange to people: historically there wasn’t as much of a pressure and push and desire for material accumulation, so many houses to this day are very humble dwellings and many are hand-built. As I speak, I can’t generalize about all the Ozarks. There are three classes in the Ozarks; there are wealthy and affluent people in the Ozarks. However, there is a widespread base of people who’ve lived there a long time whose homes are multitextured, hand-built. Small additions happen over time, but you don’t see local homes that are opulent or trophy homes. That concept I really did not see. I saw incoming development happen, trying to sell things expensively and lure people to the Ozarks from the other states… [laughs] But in the spring it’s luscious. Toward the end of our shoot the red buds happened, and there are poems about red buds. There are poems about the apple blossoms. It grows crazy down there. I don’t know, just like New York, it gets verdant, rich. The scrabble stays the same; it doesn’t get that much easier, but you don’t have to chop wood or—physical life does become easier.

In light of all that, then, what was it like to investigate the meth trade? Trying to know people or meet people… it could be a little difficult.
Exactly, and it was. We weren’t seeking to go into dangerous investigations; we weren’t journalists doing an investigation, and in that sense I’m relieved of that duty of doing what a really amazing journalist would do, which would be to actually make contacts. What we felt was rich and meaningful to us was to meet survivors, people who had the blessing of actually having survived some years or some brushup or some point in their life where that did take over them. Especially with meth, you come to believe after looking at it for a long time that—how could you even meet a survivor, or at least a survivor who can communicate well with you and has a lot of their stuff still happening? Because it is really such a slam on a human being in terms of what it does over time. We really did get a lot of help from the sheriff in several different counties, but in particular our first meeting with the author also involved a meeting with the sheriff in his county, and that was an extremely poignant discussion because the people he was dealing with were his classmates. This was not about the victory of stings or any kind of triumph in arresting people; it was about finding the people you knew from your childhood in the most abject situation, often with their kids involved, in the house, with this insane lure that you could actually make money—it’s really hard to make money in the meth trade.

Because so many people are doing it?
So many people are doing it; after all the input and the danger, the actual product is kind of slim; people end up using what they make… it just becomes this really insidious cycle, and yet the carrot is sort of dangling. In order to make money on meth it has to be done on a really gargantuan scale, often, for people to make the kind of money they think they might. Taking on any film that has issues with human devastation from drug use or any kind of physical dependency is always a heavy endeavor because what you’re going to find is going to be upsetting. It’s going to be upsetting to actually hear the accounts, but I’ll always treasure a film that’s also looking at what it means to not do the drug—what it takes in a community to not do it—or what it means when people can actually put it down. That’s a rich human struggle that captured my attention.

You did Down to the Bone as well, and so far you tackle these really dark topics. Have you found your niche here? As I recall, you’ve worked your way up: you’ve worked the boom, you’ve worked in lighting—
Yeah, but coming from an upper-middle-class background. [laughs]

Yeah, but it means you know what you’re doing. Have you found a niche in terms of subject matter?
Well, “dark” is the big four-letter word in America. It’s the four-letter word, “dark” meaning times when humans really have to work hard in order to figure out how their life is gonna work, and that’s considered heavy or dark. I don’t only want to do those topics, but in this instance Daniel’s book did capture my heart in a big way. And then in the story of Down to the Bone I’d actually had an opportunity to work with life models, I was sort of documenting them, and their story did draw me in and I was in suspense. Being newly sober is a completely suspenseful human endeavor because you’re not sure if you can do it and the pressures to relapse or pick up again in any way are numerous and daily, moment by moment, so—

And there’s no end date.
There’s no end date. It’s literally… I’d like to say it’s by a mix of the grace of god and your will, so what I valued about this woman’s story was that she was granting access, at some point saying “I am willing to sort of make a diary about what this experience is like.”

So you like to embrace this kind of thing.
I do! I’m hugely influenced by this concept that on the scale of human existence some lives we get attracted to—and that movies and biographies are made of—achieve a huge amount or do something very courageous that is often very public. Then in other lives it takes and equal amount of force and human or psychic energy to change your ways even just a millimeter from something, just to make your life a little bit better or a little bit different.

Is there something in your life that draws you to this or are you just incredibly empathetic about the human condition?
I think it does go back to how geography marks us, you know? I feel like I knew one specific path in my suburban upbringing. I always wondered what it was like to live in a place with a town center, with a piazza or plaza or anything. I constantly found myself reading stories as a kid—like, “What’s it like to be you?” I think it’s a common thing to somehow think of your life as neutral; even if it’s not denigrating your own life, you know only one set of things—one set of lifestyle choices and of surroundings—so my whole life I found myself wondering that.

Have you ever thought about acting? That’s another way of exploring that.
You know, for whatever reason, I was always behind the camera. That was my comfort zone. I actually had to force myself to take some acting classes to learn how to communicate as a director, you know, at HB Studio.

So your general adjustment towards this curiosity of yours is as an observer.
Definitely. I’ve always kind of loved this notion that all throughout history there have been notetakers, scribes, and I always feel like that was sort of my calling: this observational practice and this sort of compulsive notetaking.

How were you as an actor?
[laughs] I would say I was so what I am that it was very hard for me to ever… but I remember I did one thing that had a lot of impact. I struggle sometimes with anger management within the context of my family, like I blow up sometimes at people like my brother, and there was a scene that required me to do that and I think there was terror among the class because I got so mad at this other actor. I mean, there were a few roles that were so close to my personal experience that—

A little Method acting there.
Yeah. Exactly.

Winter's Bone is in theatres now.