If you haven’t seen any films by filmmaker Jeremy Saulnier, then you’re missing out. He’s one of the very best up-and-coming directors around. His 2014 film “Blue Ruin” is a crime-thriller masterpiece and 2016’s “Green Room” was such a dark and nasty neo-Nazi revenge thriller that it felt like an avant-garde horror movie.
Saulnier’s latest venture into the dark abyss, “Hold the Dark,” has him teaming up with Netflix. The film follows a wolf expert that travels to a small Alaskan village to investigate the disappearances of three children, who may or may not have been killed by wolves. The retired naturalist and wolf expert, Russell Cole, is played Jeffrey Wright as he journeys to the very edge of civilization to find answers. Medora Slone (Riley Keough), a young mother whose son was one of three children killed by a pack of wolves, has called for his help. However, the story has much more than meets the eye and “Hold the Dark,” a nastily-rendered genre hybrid from Saulnier, has surprises that shock at every turn.
Saulnier continues his knack for visceral violence, you feel every gunshot wound, every stabbing of the knife, every punch, with the director inserting a kind of magical-surrealism that compliments the world being created, from a story adapted by longtime collaborator Macon Blair from a novel by William Giraldi.
READ MORE: ‘Hold the Dark’: Jeremy Saulnier Crafts A Moody, Post-Peckinpah Thriller [TIFF Review]
I spoke to the director about the grander canvas he has with this latest film, how it was collaborating with Netflix, and what he learned from his failed “True Detective” experience
After directing three films that felt minimalist, at least as far as the genres they were tackling, stripping down all the cliches for a more bare-bones kind of approach, how is tackling a much grander canvas in “Hold the Dark”?
I was brought up by self-financing those first three movies. I have this tic where I won’t write on a certain scale, I won’t write above a certain budget range because my fear is I can’t get funding for a movie, especially when I put my credit card down and self-fund it. That’s why I’m always contained by design, and “Hold the Dark” was not my own design, it was this very electric novel I read, for which Macon Blair recommended to me. It was written by William Giraldi and adapted by Macon, so they did the heavy lifting, I wasn’t worried about writing out of my budget range because there was no way in hell I could afford to put my credit card down and finance “Hold the Dark.”
It’s very exciting to break out of that self-imposed feeling an just tackle so many new things and expand my cinematic horizon, so to speak. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. For example, I was shooting a war scene in Morrocco and then shooting this wintry action with wolves in Alberta with aerials. So really scaling up in a big way, but, you know, in many respects, the movie is more complex, it is beautifully odd in the non-traditional nature of it, and that’s a very rare thing, when you scale up, to get more weird which is fucking awesome for somebody like me and something I couldn’t pass up.
It’s almost impossible to explain the full extent of “Hold the Dark” on paper, it’s a blending of genres, a kind of gothic-horror-mystery-thriller, how would you explain the genre that you’re tackling here?
It could be classified as a …. [pause] … sort of crime-thriller-western-adventure movie? Or a crime-thriller-western-horror-adventure movie actually? [laughs] I let others decide. I do certainly veer towards the hybrid films, where you can’t quite think what it is. That adds to the unpredictability of the material. When I read the novel, I did not see the events that unfolded coming. I just was really shocked and excited by it, entranced by the mystical nature of it and certainly familiar with the more grounded crime elements that are in it as well. It’s infused with so many things that I just approach it from an overall tone. It has this sort of ancient myth, infused with a crime thriller. I certainly channeled it into something and it was based on the visceral experience I had with it as a reader. Sometimes that doesn’t give you all the answers. “Hold the Dark” is not a genre to me, it’s just an immersive experience and all I want is for people to feel like they went to this place, they won’t necessarily come back with all the answers but they certainly were there and they witnessed something.