{"id":844,"date":"2011-06-07T08:24:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-07T15:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/06\/making-winters-bone-a-reality.html"},"modified":"2011-06-07T08:24:00","modified_gmt":"2011-06-07T15:24:00","slug":"making-winters-bone-a-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2011\/06\/making-winters-bone-a-reality.html","title":{"rendered":"Making "Winter’s Bone" a Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

ONE of the best films of 2010 was Winter’s Bone, a kind of little movie that could which ended up with an Oscar nomination for star Jennifer Lawrence and her very tough performance as a determined Ozarks girl. (The actress just showed up in various states of undress in the latest GQ.)<\/i>

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Tonight the wonderful country-folk band that plays throughout the film performs at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery as part of a national tour.<\/i>

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It’s easy to forget that this movie came close to not happening at all; it was largely due to the determination of its director and producers — and some good luck — that it saw the light of day. Here, in an exclusive for The Misread City, is how it happened.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

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<\/a>Much of the praise that greeted Winter\u2019s Bone<\/i> \u2013 Debra Granik\u2019s lean, mean tale of a determined girl on the trail of her reckless father \u2013 focused on its setting in Missouri\u2019s poor, isolated Ozark Mountains: This was not the kind of film Hollywood is often accused of making, in which a film crew condescends to or caricatures a region far from Brentwood or the Upper West Side.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cThe last thing we wanted to be,\u201d says producer Alix Madigan-Yorkin, \u201cwere tourists dropped into the Ozarks. Every aspect of the life was really well observed before the production.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Part of what led to the nuanced treatment of the setting, oddly, was the long uphill climb to financing. \u201cThe fact that we couldn\u2019t find funding for three years,\u201d says Anne Rosellini, both a writer and a producer on the project, \u201cwas our best friend.\u201d<\/div>\n
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As the New York-based filmmakers \u2013 who had come together over their love of Daniel Woodrell\u2019s Winter\u2019s Bone<\/i> novella and the subsequent scripts — waited for this or that source to come through, \u201cWe kept going down to the Ozarks to do research \u2013 with our d.p., bringing back look books,\u201d that captured the region\u2019s cabins, ponds and hillsides, and the beauty that survived the poverty and ravages of crystal meth.<\/div>\n
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\u201cIf this thing was going to convey some tone and flavor,\u201d says Granik, \u201cwe needed to get our asses down there. And to marry the screenplay to lived reality. Find a house, a school, that [heroine] Ree would really inhabit.\u201d There was no way to rush it.”<\/div>\n
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\u201cWe were able to take a really deep look,\u201d Rosellini continues. \u201cAnd we shot the film on location, on people\u2019s private land \u2013 that took years<\/i> to line up. Two New York women can\u2019t just show up and do what we did.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Winter\u2019s Bone<\/i> has also drawn enormous acclaim for Jennifer Lawrence\u2019s staring role. The Louisville native plays the implacable teenage girl who marches over fences and across frozen ground, defying violent neighbors in an effort to track down her father, who is wanted on bond and quite possibly dead. This aspect of the film, too, would have turned out very differently if its funding path had been more conventional.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cWe went through the standard way of trying to get this off the ground,\u201c Madigan-Yorkin says of the early stages of development. \u201cTrying to attract an actor who could draw funding.\u201d One early potential funder, \u201cwas pushing us toward names that were more familiar.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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When expected financing fell through, on Halloween 2007, it was devastating, says Granik. \u201cThis company eventually said, \u2018We\u2019ll lose our shirt.\u2019 It was truly dreary at the end.\u201d She felt such a sting at her American story being rejected by American financiers that she wished she could flee to Europe. \u201cYou feel like one of those disenfranchised jazz musicians. We felt throttled down.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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But the financing they eventually landed \u2013 which was modest — offered a major advantage: \u201cWe could cast who we wanted, Madigan-Yorkin says. \u201d And for the viewer, \u201cYou could disappear into the film: Actors faces and names weren\u2019t jumping out at you.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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By the time $2 million in funding came through \u2013 mostly from a group of New York based private investors \u2013 the team was ready to make the film their own way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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The resulting film developed significant buzz after its first Sundance screening, attracting Roadside Attractions to distribute and winning the Grand Jury Prize.<\/div>\n
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Winter\u2019s Bone<\/i> \u2013 which was on the regional film festival circuit for months — also won something that may be more valuable, Madigan-Yorkin says. \u201cThis earned most of its money in the heartland. The people in Missouri, where we shot it, really embraced it. Usually you make your money in the standard art house circuit,\u201d in big cities on the coasts.<\/div>\n
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Rosellini credits that resonance to the respect they showed that setting and the time they had to sink into it. \u201cYou get financing from a production company and you don\u2019t get the luxury of that kind of research,\u201d she says. \u201cIf Debra and I could have been in development forever\u2026 That\u2019s the most fun time. In this case there was no one to tell us no.\u201d<\/div>\n
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\u201cIf we\u2019d gotten the funding earlier \u2013 and we were pretty far down the path with someone \u2013 who knows.\u201d<\/div>\n
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ONE of the best films of 2010 was Winter’s Bone, a kind of little movie that could which ended up with an Oscar nomination for star Jennifer Lawrence and her very tough performance as a determined Ozarks girl. (The actress just showed up in various states of undress in the latest GQ.)Tonight the wonderful country-folk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[76,64,72],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-844","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-film","7":"category-folk-music","8":"category-the-south","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}