I am wondering what the script-writing process is like for a film like this, where the dialogue is so realistic and seems almost improvisational. You’ve spoken about shaping the script with the actors as well. Could you tell me more about that process?
The scenes that involve just the intensity of [Ben and Tom] relating, needing to negotiate something, team up or cleaving or separating, those scenes are very much worked out between them, and they are inflecting new things that come up for them. The skills trainer, for example, did work with them, but then they took those things and negotiated, “Where are the knives? Do they share a knife? Does she need to make more feather sticks for the fire?” You know, on take ten, or take six, he would then have to say, really, “Tom, I need another feather stick,” or, “Cut me up some,” or something. And so that’s not in the script, but because they’re building a fire, they’ve got a real task.
So now the script needs some modifications sometimes because it needs to pertain to what they’re doing right now. They know the scene, but if she says something unexpected and he really answers her and they don’t break the scene, I may well use that. So the scenes have room for additions. In that sense, I shy away from the word “improv,” because the scene is set, what they’re doing. So they’re not creating a new version of the scene, but gestures and moments and looks between them will be theirs to enact. And then if I see a place where I’d like a look, like—that’s a very typical trope where, at the end of the scene you might say, “Tom, just steal another look at Ben. Just check on the fire,” or, “Really make eye contact right now. Tell him you cannot wait any longer for your breakfast, let him know with your eyes.” I’m seeing things they’re doing, and then I might try to capture and get another variation on that.
Is there a particular organic moment between them that made it into the film that was a favorite of yours?
It’s very, very mundane, but it was so natural that it’s a favorite because I would love to have a lot of moments in a film flow this way. The banality might be derailing, but—they were eating boiled eggs for breakfast. And in real life, Tom needed a lot of salt for her egg. So, he really passes the salt. But it flowed in the real process of eating an egg, and there’s something about that. Maybe because he’s not anticipating it, I don’t know, there’s something about it that felt like they were really having breakfast. These two people were having breakfast in the woods, and I’m standing there with the whole artifice of a setup of a crew and looking through a monitor and whatnot, and I’m buying it. I love that, when I’m brought into the fiction. So that is exciting, and they did many things of that nature. When they would hide in the ferns, a couple times Ben couldn’t find her very easily, sometimes it was too easy. The scenes had variation, but that kept them on their toes. Next time, she knew she had to hide better. We didn’t use it because maybe it took too long—there was one where he couldn’t find her! So, I loved that that’s making it vivid for them. There’s not a mark where he goes to every time to find her.
How has addiction, which is a recurring theme throughout your work, evolved in this film? There’s this valence of literal drug addiction atop this deeper vice that the father has, where he always needs to run away.
With addiction I’m always interested in, how do people get out from under it? Because it’s such a through-line of human history. I’ve been asked, “Why do you always make films about drugs?” And so my answer is, “I’m always trying to make films about how you get around them. You know, how people put it down when it has been a way of self-medicating.” That was something that caught me and held me in [“Down to the Bone”], which was chronicling a family that was making their foray into sobriety, but there were kids in tow. And “Winter’s Bone” showed a black market that was really crushing communities and really infiltrating into the lives of families. Members of the families were getting caught up in the usage of it, but also the selling of it, and in that toxic mix, it was such a lethal substance. It veered off from other drugs of the past in the sense that it was really never meant to be ingested into the human body ever, in any form. But there, this young woman is taking stock, she’s like, “This is really ravaging my community. We’re a poor community already. Members of my family have been taken down by this. How the hell?” And it’s offered, and she has no taste for it, she wants to extricate herself from that web, not participate.
And in this film, something that I found very hard to watch as an American was the VA having such huge links—seeing these enormous, enormous, unfathomable contracts, these lucrative contracts, with big pharma, and then to think that we could medicate people’s consciences. We can’t. To think that you could medicate away war and its aftermath…The person who diverts the drugs [in “Leave No Trace”], he’s a local actor, Derek John Drescher, and he’s a vet. The meds had his name on them, and he knew those drugs so well. I just love the torque of his statement, holding up a pill and saying, “When’s the last time that stopped a nightmare?” There’s that crazy corporate hooey that a pill can take away what we subject combat veterans to and what their lives are like afterwards, and so we don’t take responsibility for what is altered in combat veterans. So the films do look at the shocking prevalence of drugs and alcohol in everyday life, and always look at what it means. If it’s a choice to not really have that dominate or overly influence someone’s existence, what does it take to get past them and around them, through them, over them?