00:27This is Tim Wassberg from Fest Track on Surf TV.
00:29I'm here in Toronto, Ontario for the Toronto Film Festival.
00:33Well, first, I mean, obviously this is a story of displacement, but also mentality, specifically with Leo's character.
00:44Could you each talk about the concept and how it came to be?
00:50It is, you hit it right on the nose there, calling it a movie of displacement.
00:55A displacement child living with a displaced mother who was taken from Canada over to Alaska.
01:04And so there's this sense of loss twice over.
01:09And so Woody was a guy living half in the native world, half in the non-native world, and they
01:19belong to either, neither.
01:20And so his view of life was skewed towards loneliness and depression and a question of why bother continuing if
01:36I'm going to feel like this.
01:38And from that weakest moment that we saw him be in, it sort of awoken his, like, I need to
01:51get out of here.
01:52And to get out of there was to escape being in trouble.
01:59And when he was, that entire journey is a way of him saying, you know, I do value myself.
02:09I just didn't know it or couldn't see it or couldn't feel it or was ignorant of it.
02:16And then as time went on, you know, he started to wake up and question himself.
02:22And by the time he got to where his mother's actually from, still feeling sort of out of place,
02:29but being accepted into the community for who he was and then slowly became a human being again,
02:40someone who cares about himself, cares about the people he's living with and the actions that he is doing,
02:48which means he's also, you know, part of something.
02:52He's not a displaced person anymore.
02:58He's an active member of the community by the end.
03:49But it is a journey and you guys have to create that sort of environment.
03:53Can you talk about, before I go into the characters, because the environment is such a thing in this.
04:00It's about that journey, you know, obviously from civilization to, you know, just, how would I put it?
04:07Put it into returning to roots, if you will.
04:10I mean, I'm happy to.
04:12And also maybe going back to your question about genre and the thriller aspect of it.
04:18And I think what Finney and I all the time really liked about the story is that the layer that
04:24is underneath,
04:25it's really profound.
04:27And we had to balance it in a good way.
04:32And Finney can talk about that more.
04:36But there was also the aspect that somebody is really in trouble, you know, he cannot continue to live like
04:44this with himself.
04:45And then, what are we going to see next?
04:50Well, maybe in a drama, he's going to a therapist.
04:54In our film, he somehow acts, bizarrely hits the oil pipeline.
05:01Like, there's not a lot around in the environment where he's from.
05:06This is one of the big things that is around.
05:09The only thing you should do is never touch it.
05:13He shoots his rifle, a big-ass rifle at the thing.
05:20And, you know, there's a huge spill and he's just panicking and he's running and he doesn't know what he's
05:29doing.
05:29And so, this journey that you're talking about and the environment is kind of a lot of external forces are
05:39pushing him to start moving from that place where he should not be to a better place.
05:46But the way it happens to him, it doesn't feel at all like something that he would have chosen or
05:52that he can embrace.
05:54He's just, you know, what the hell is happening and trying to survive.
05:58And if we would ask him, like, where are you in your journey of, you know, self-discovery or healing
06:05or he's like, I don't know anything.
06:19Gotta lift before the mist eats the rotors.
06:53I was talking about balance, you know.
06:56And the balance is it's interesting creating control versus chaos.
07:00And you see both of those things within both Noomi's character and Leo's character.
07:06They're both battling against their inner demons.
07:09But the fact that they cannot control their own destiny per se, they have to move it forward to the
07:14end.
07:15But it's about the choice you make at that point.
07:18One seemed very controlled in the beginning.
07:23And the other one was obviously very, how do you call it, in a silent, chaotic household.
07:32And so, and so immediately you think they're in two different places.
07:38But in the further along you watch the film, like, even in the first few minutes, the unseen chaos that
07:51Woody was in becomes, you know, visible chaos.
07:57As he journeys to escape from the pipeline situation and then realizing later on that he was being chased by
08:06the FBI.
08:10I don't think that was like 100% intentional, but that's the way it came out in the end.
08:16And then for Tar Heel's storyline was, seemed like someone who's in control, who's in charge, who's done this before.
08:31And then we're realizing, like, she's taking the therapeutic route of talking about the stuff that she had gone through
08:41before.
08:41And these are two different worlds, once with the FBI's, therefore they have access to therapy.
08:48And the other one is just like, my only action I can take is either drugs, alcohol, or suicide.
08:56And so that sort of is, you couldn't tell that these two worlds were going to collide at the end
09:05in the same way it finishes.
09:08And that's, I think, what I love about it.
09:12They both have their own struggles and journeys that they had to do throughout the film.
09:20Breach, breach.
09:23Entry in progress.
09:32Alpha 3, batch 1, clear.
09:39Alpha 2, bedroom 2, clear.
09:43Bravo 2, contact email at rear entry.
09:46Mem, FBI, turn around.
09:47Man, visible.
09:49Down on the ground.
09:49Down, visible.
09:50All, straight out.
09:51Do it now.
09:52Okay.
09:54Yeah, maybe it's nice to hold the two of them together because Numi Alpas obviously has done so many films
10:01already, amazing films.
10:03And then we thought she will be, you know, very good to be this agent that we cannot really grasp,
10:15like, how is she playing that game?
10:20Where is she getting all her information?
10:22She's a bit of a mystery.
10:23She doesn't talk a lot.
10:24And then when we met Numi for the first time and showed her the script, I think there was three
10:31times as much dialogue for her character that we had envisioned.
10:35And in a very gentle way, she was trying to say to us, you know, I was brought up in
10:41Iceland, me and my grandmother, we could go for a day.
10:46And if there were maybe 10 sentences throughout that whole day from sunrise to sunset, that would not be a
10:54silent day.
10:55So we wanted to go for that, or we thought that that would work very well.
11:02But then obviously she's hiding a lot of the same kind of dark stuff that Leo, the Woody character, has
11:11to struggle with.
11:12And so it's very strange that they come from a very, very different background.
11:18And Leo had not been in front of a camera for one hour, like, this is his very first experience
11:24with movie making.
11:27And so he was very much, like, just in the moment and improvising and looking to us to see, like,
11:37what can we try now?
11:38And all these things that we were coming up with.
11:41But when I see the film now, it is very weird to see that, in a sense, they are very
11:48similar in that they're human beings who really dare to be naked in front of the camera.
11:58Like, they can be in such a form that I, the viewer, come very close.
12:07And you forget that it's a film and that there was a crew and that it was, like, freaking cold
12:12on the set.
12:13And all of that is stripped away.
12:15And both of them, him, without having all that experience, and her after such a great career, they have that.
12:23And I think it ties them together, that authentic glue, let's say.
12:57It's using the senses.
12:59That's the great thing about this film.
13:00You can almost smell the, you can feel the cold, you can smell the oil, you can do all that.
13:07And that's hard to do.
13:08I think the pacing originally was going to be always slow when we were writing it.
13:17But with the rapid fire, FBI agent talking all the time, Numi, and then her suggestion early on, it's like,
13:26let's move her, the blunt of her dialogue over to...
13:32Then, after meeting Numi, we thought, hmm, let's switch.
13:38And then even on, during the rehearsals and on set, we found that if we can talk less, it's helpful.
13:46Because the kind of, is it brooding scent was heightened if people were just, you know, acting without speaking their
13:57mind.
13:58It forced the pace to go even slower because there were deeper moments where, say, Numi wanted to say something
14:09but used her body language instead.
14:11And that was more powerful than saying, I smell something fishy.
14:16So, I mean, and, and, and Leo being a relative new actor, I think would be given lots of directions
14:33and the way his mind works, he would focus either on the first direction or the last direction.
14:40And so half the time he was improvising or sort of feeling out what he thought should be taking place
14:48by conversations that was happening like weeks before.
14:51He, he did take several acting classes or, or, or, or dialogue coaching in order to get to that place
15:00because we needed his character to be like the best we can, we can have.
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