Bucking the trend for offbeat cuteness that has come to characterise the American indie, writer/director Courtney Hunt brought us Sundance winner Frozen River, a gripping thriller boasting feminist undertones, political relevance and harsh topographical specificity. In it, destitute blue-collar worker Ray (Melissa Leo) partners up with a native American woman (Misty Upham) smuggling illegal immigrants across the US-Canadian border. Social realist to some, feminist to others, and damn fine storyteller to Quentin Tarantino, the good news is that Courtney Hunt is all of the above – and with a period love story set at the turn of the century in the pipeline, probably a whole lot more.
LWLies: Can you tell us about your journey to Frozen River?
Hunt: Well, it was a long journey, and went on for about three years. I started by writing and shooting a short, and that short was a critical scene that later appeared in the movie. In doing that, I ended up getting into the New York Film Festival, and after I did that I felt that this was a good enough idea to embark upon a feature script with, and I sort of already had my cast, so I went back and I wrote it. It took me a year to fundraise for it, and we shot in 24 days, and that’s kind of how. I’d had the idea of women who smuggled seven or eight years prior to that, because I knew about the situation at the border of New York State and Canada, and I was fascinated by that and the idea that women did it. What would possess them to do something so obviously dangerous? I found that the answer was the economy there, that the desperation of living and being really, really poor and trying to raise your children will really drive you to do all kinds of things, this being one of them.
LWLies: How did you come to involve Melissa Leo and Misty Upham?
Hunt: Melissa I met when she brought 21 Grams to the town where I live, and she was open to talking to me, so I sent the short to her, and she said she’d do it. By getting her involved in the short, I was able to launch the whole idea into the world. Misty, I found on the internet on a site for Native American actors. We can call it casting, but basically I found people. It was the kind of movie that came together in that magical way that if you’ve got your script done, and people can understand it, things start to come together.
LWLies: Do you have a process that you go through with actors?
Hunt: Well, we didn’t have time for rehearsal. I did a good job on the script, and when I turned it over to Melissa, I really worked on her actual performance to nuance it and bring it in a little bit. She tends to show a great deal fast in her acting, and I wanted to have her hold back a little bit and reveal herself in a slower way so the audience can catch on and project their own points of view on to her. Iñárritu was very careful with her too. She’s like a little raw force of nature, and she’s a natural element, and I think with the right director she is safe enough to work with you – you take that energy and you honour it and respect it, and there’s a co-operation and a collaboration that occurs. We worked hard on it.
LWLies: You’ve challenged films like Erin Brockovich for their glamorisation of poverty. In what ways is Frozen River a reaction to such films?
Hunt: I didn’t mean to be hateful about that movie! I just mean that the filmmaker was maybe reluctant to let the audience sit in discomfort and witness the less humourous side of poverty. Poverty’s not a joke. On the other hand, there are moments in Erin Brockovich that are very desperate. But it’s all ramped up when you deal with a big, big, big movie star who I think, actually, is kind of wonderful in many ways, but I think that for me, there’s moments of poverty and desperation that are not, a) beautiful or b) funny; they’re just really depressing. The audience can handle that. I think you just give the audience more credit.
LWLies: One reading of Frozen River is that the film is about a specific gender experience. In what way is it important to you to be dealing with those experiences as a female director?
Hunt: I think of the director as an eye. You can put the camera there, or you can put the camera there, and whatever you choose to see is your vision. I think there may be differences we see in the way a man and a woman would approach the same material. But there’s also a million differences in the way different men would approach the same material, or gay men, or straight men, or of a million ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. So I think women bring that as a gift to film rather than a limitation. I get all nervous when I hear that question because I think ‘limiting’ – it sounds narrowing or constricting when I actually find it to be a sort of blasting things open.
LWLies: How does the film speak to what’s happening in America politically and culturally right now?
Hunt: It’s more of a mirror of the tendencies and the trends I was observing at the time of writing it. But the working poor were present in the ’80s, were present in the ’90s, are present now, will be present in 20 years, and they have been completely and totally ignored. So even before the economic ‘downturn’ as we like to call it, they were there working pay cheque to pay cheque and getting laid off and going under the poverty line. They are omnipresent. But politically, I was really afraid around 9/11 that this film would never happen, that people would be furious with me for talking about the point of view of a smuggler bringing in illegal immigrants into our precious country, that I would be tarred and feathered. But I was just reporting that it’s going on – my point of view I want to be transparent.
LWLies: You say ‘reporting’ and indeed the film uses naturalism, social realism and shaky, handheld close ups. Is this to reflect the particular subject matter of Frozen River, or fundamental to your style as a director?
Hunt: This is a problem for me right now because everybody sees me and says, ‘Oh, she’s that social realism girl’ and I was just serving my story. I like my frame and the style of the thing to be a part of the fabric of the story, to literally blossom out of it. In terms of the movement of the camera, I knew I wanted that camera to feel off-balance because Ray’s off-balance and we need to go there with her. In my next film, it’ll be completely different.
LWLies: What’s your next film?
Hunt: It’s a period piece that I’m working on, a love story which takes place at the turn of the century. It’s about a Lower East Side girl who is half-German and half-Irish, which was a problem, and she meets an uptown chef. Her father is selling her off into prostitution incrementally and she knows she’s got to escape, so it’s really the story of her escape. It’s about being an American woman and what it means to live in that world.
LWLies: So it’s again about giving a voice to marginality?
Hunt: Yes. I think in the margins you find gems, and you find universals. I think it lets people into a story, rather than closing them off, but that is not the prevailing view. I’m working on a script about a Sephardic Israeli immigrant woman who comes to New York City, and they wanted the prior writer to strip out all of the ethnicity, and it was like, ‘Okay, but this is really boring!’ Who she is is critical to what she does.
LWLies: Who are your influences?
Hunt: The films of the ’70s are the biggest ones. My mother took me to those movies when I was very, very young. I saw Taxi Driver when I should not have seen it. What she did was she educated me in the movies. Also, I wasn’t a particularly popular teenager and we were kind of poor, so I went to the cinema a lot. Her feeling was that these filmmakers are telling the truth about what they’re seeing so you need to see this if you want to understand the world. And then I love Paul Schrader, Jane Campion and Stephen Frears. I take courage from different directors for different things.
