How Wild It Was To Let It Be

Director Jean-Marc Vallée on location while filming Wild.
Photo: Play a trick on Searchlight Pictures

Jean-Marc Vallée walks into the room and plops his telephone onto the table. A few of us film writers are gathered at the Fairmont Royal York to hash out Vallée's latest film Wild at the Toronto International Pic Festival, and the not bad Québécois director (Café de flore, Dallas Buyers Lodge) is the offset to speak. Vallée puts his phone next to the recording devices we've all placed earlier him, only instead of turning on a microphone, he turns on a song.

"El Condor Pasa" rises from the phone as Simon & Garfunkel play the same powerful guitar riff that forms the central theme of Wild. All of united states at the table sit transfixed as the music, powerful for something coming from such a small device, fills the room and puts us in the heed of Cheryl Strayed, the character played past Reese Witherspoon and the author on whose memoir Wild is based. The music too puts us in the mind of Mr. Vallée as his passion for the song and his beautiful film becomes immediately palpable.

Vallée at the TIFF Wild printing conference.
Photo: Wireimage / Getty for TIFF.

The graphic symbol of a soundtrack is a hallmark of a Vallée film and the director himself sets the tone for the word by opening with a question, or experience, that everyone at the table conspicuously wants to savor. How 1 introduces music in a film with every bit natural a setting as the Pacific Crest Trail that houses the bulk of Wild is a tricky chore, for few, if any, diegetic sources be for injecting Simon and Garfunkel into the film. Cheryl tin can't plough on an iPod since Wild more often than not occurs in 1995 and Vallée admits a dislike for instrumental scores that might otherwise span silence in a flick. Vallée, after he stops the runway at the precise second at which it stops during the film, astutely notes that Strayed's mind and memories create the soundtrack of Wild, which uses pre-existing music in lieu of a conventional score. The lyrics don't announced in Wild; instead, the music situates Cheryl's own words within her cinematic journey. "How wild it was to let it be," Vallée quotes from Strayed's memoir as he lets her words repeat the sentiment of the song.

The words Vallée recites from the author'southward story—an immensely pop book that brings high expectations that the picture show gamely meets—offer fitting words to summarize how best to approach an adaptation of such high esteem. How wild information technology must have been for the artist and his bandage to create a way to be respectful of Strayed's work while also being loyal and true to the film experience. The result is a beautiful memory mosaic and arguably the pic of the year.

Vallée talks about Wild with the same fever of excitement that we practise, and then the conversation easily slides into Wild's delicate balance of form and grapheme post-obit Vallée'south introduction with the song. "Sometimes that'south a ghost song. Sometimes she's humming information technology, sometimes she'southward singing information technology," Vallée says of "El Condor Pasa" as he explains how Cheryl provides the key source for music in the pic. The song has a "mystical quality," Vallée says as it accompanies Cheryl's female parent, Bobbi (a radiant Laura Dern), forth the trail.

Strayed's memoir provides a valuable origin for the soundtrack itself, for Vallée notes that her pages are rife with song references. Vallée explains that the soundtrack for Wild is a mix of songs that inspired Strayed and some choices of his own inspiration: "Cheryl mentions many songs in her book and I tried to respect that," Vallée notes. "I want ascertain the characters through music and through their reality, and they sometimes interact with it," he says. Cheryl, Vallée jokes, is "contaminated by her female parent's gustatory modality." Vallée elaborates that Bobbi'south fondness for Simon & Garfunkel and, quite effectively, Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," builds depth of character through song.

Reese Witherspoon and managing director Jean-Marc Vallee filming on location for Wild.
Photograph: Fox Searchlight Pictures

The influence of Bobbi on the music, both for Cheryl and for Vallée, rings throughout the film and the chat equally Vallée discusses how his rapport with Dern shaped much of the moving picture. Dern, whom Vallée praises as the most experienced member of the Wild team, vibrantly infuses the film with Bobbi's vitality for life as she and Vallée form a graphic symbol through improvisation and synergy. Wild makes Bobbi such a tangible graphic symbol even though she appears largely in the fragments of Vallée'south kaleidoscopic aesthetic that forms the film.

I ask Vallée about my favourite part of Wild--the editing--and he explains how he shoots the moving picture with the cutting in listen. (Vallée edits the motion picture under the pseudonym John Mac McMurphy forth with collaborator Martin Pensa.) He says he explores ways on set to create a language for the story using the fluidity of the camera and the bodies of his actors. "I knew I was going to have fun with the editing. Movie house is a big toy and we're all kids," he says. The chemical element of play largely permeates the moving picture through the camera's rapport with Laura Dern, and that the element of the mother following and accompanying Cheryl on the trail furthers the mythical quality of the music and memories that fuel Cheryl along her journey.

Vallée adds that the improvisation with Dern came naturally during the shoot. In fact, he recalls that he and Dern first brought Bobbi to life when Dern came for a make-up examination while he was shooting with Witherspoon on the PCT, and he invited her to film some material while they waited for Witherspoon. "Perchance I'll use your ghost on the trail," he recalls proverb to Dern as they ad-libbed ten to twelve shots throughout the shoot that appear in the final cutting of the film. Many of these haunting cutaways to Bobbi make Dern's character an ever-nowadays guardian angel throughout the pic as her relationship with Cheryl brings the film to its ultimate catharsis. "It's nice to be creative on the spot," Vallée adds. "You gotta plan, yous gotta structure, but you know that that fuckin' thing has to be as emotional every bit the material." He cites one detail flashback scene where Dern jumps in a pool and splashes the kids as 1 scene they improvised while waiting for Witherspoon and it's 1 of the candid moments in which Bobbi'south effusive lust for life gives Wild its heart.

Laura Dern as Bobbi in Wild. Photo: Play tricks Searchlight Pictures

Dern, sporting a cup of peppermint tea (with dear), joins the party after Vallée moves to the side by side circular of festival speed dating. Dern brings to the table the same warmth and spirit that she injects into Wild, and the chat flows like a group chat at over coffee. The actress speaks as warmly about Vallée every bit the managing director does about her, referring to her Wild helmer as a "gentle giant."

Dern says she relishes shoots like Wild in which the creation of a motion-picture show and a grapheme plays out as something collaborative and spontaneous. She recalls the moments where Vallée excitedly invited her to shoot some footage while they waited for Reese to become ready (a happy tendency, it seems…) and she reminisces nearly the Wild shoots in her best Quebecois accent, playing the role of Jean-Marc Vallée, laughing, "Oh, Reese isn't prepare. We have five minutes. Let's get shoot with Laura!"

Dern praises Vallée'south active collaboration with the cast and crew, specially cinematographer Yves Bélanger, "the great duo from Montréal!" she laughs comfortably before sipping more tea and elaborating about the experience of working with a filmmaker who is both a director and an editor. "It's one thing to accept a swell managing director, she says, "but it's another matter to take a great editor and director. The mode he weaves retentiveness and in a non-linear mode—because people like stories done baldheaded with a beginning, and a middle, and an end—only that'due south not the way memory comes to usa. And he played with that and then beautifully and cutting together a bulk of everything I did with the kids. Information technology'due south in pieces and you really feel the mother."

Laura Dern (left) and Reese Witherspoon (right) star in Wild.
Photograph: Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Dern also cites Strayed'due south openness and accessibility as a tool for bringing Wild to the screen so richly and vividly. She contrasts the experience of her other heartbreaking performance of 2014 in the adaptation of John Greene's The Error in Our Stars, maxim that a different degree of responsibility comes when 1 tackles such beloved nonetheless disparate adaptations considering, as she puts it, "the only difference is that John was giving gifts of his imagination and this was Cheryl'southward life, and then the responsibleness you have [is] to honour someone and never betray what is their story." Honouring a work is just as essential for actors as it is for filmmakers, for the adaptation process draws on different sources, similar books, characters, memories and, in Dern's example, mothers.

"Y'all go very protective," says Dern every bit she explains how taking on characters both real and imaginary surely sets the projects apart. "All our improvisation was to get to a line Cheryl said," notes Dern, as she recalls parts of the film such equally Bobbi's query about "zipless fucks" or the splashing scene Vallée remembers as role of their process of finding Wild and Bobbi through their ain journey with the character. "If I didn't spend as much time with Cheryl equally I did," Dern continues, "and hadn't combed over the book, and the same with Jean-Marc, it would not take been fair to do what we did… To implant yourself into that feel… you lot only want anybody to feel that love and gratitude that she [Bobbi] seemed to find in life."

The female parent roles of Wild and The Mistake in Our Stars couldn't exist more than different, just Dern laughs loudly and infectiously as she recalls the wildly disparate mothers she's played throughout her career. "The only time I've been a mother in a movie, I'chiliad, like, high on spray pigment and significant with my kid and I don't know where they are," she jokes while mentioning some of her memorable characters in Denizen Ruth and Rambling Rose. "If I'm meaning, information technology's a disaster. I've never really had it together. I've always played girls, even arrested development girls. Even on the prove I did for HBO [Enlightened] it was like playing a 19-year-old. I experience like it'southward the first time I've played women and mothers, and that was a beautiful experience."

Dern, who has 2 children herself, says that her piece of work this year with Wild and The Mistake in Our Stars really marks a shift in roles in her career. Playing such strong mother characters in both films, Dern says, informed each other in ways of considering how herself as a female parent. The gift of being a female parent both onscreen and off, she says, is "offer the wisdom that nosotros get from knowing this particular kind of love that is like zilch else. Such different people and places and spaces, and when it came to Wild it came desperately trying to be her mother."

Cheryl Strayed and Laura Dern at the Wild Cherry Carpeting at TIFF.

Credit: George Pimentel, WireImage/Getty for TIFF

The success of bringing Bobbi to life—and as tangibly and humanely as Dern does in her award-caliber performance—clearly hitting a annotation with Strayed. Strayed'south daughter Bobbi, named after her mother, plays the younger Cheryl in the moving picture and she shares the screen with Dern as the grandmother she never knew. Dern recalls a moment where Strayed spoke openly about seeing her interact with Bobbi during the shoot. Strayed, Dern says, said that her great heartbreak was that her children never got to meet her female parent. Cheers to the motion picture, even so, Dern quotes Strayed with a candid mix of pride and heartfelt emotion, recalling the author telling her, "Now they're knowing her through you."

Dern speaks very passionately about the mother-girl relationship of Wild and talks excitedly about seeing the film as an addition to a changing landscape of films with strong female person protagonists. There'south an understandable hint of frustration amongst the enthusiasm, though, as she notes that films similar Wild are function of a cycle. "Information technology'southward interesting for all of u.s.a. movie lovers considering we know it existed earlier," Dern says of a filmscape with potent women. "The only sad news is that we have to keep circling back to where Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck were. We had it in the 30s and 40s and nosotros lost in the 50s, so we got information technology again in the late 60s and 70s. You know, people were in line for Klute and An Unmarried Woman and we fell in dearest with those women with no judgement… and then nosotros lost information technology once more! So, conspicuously, we're getting information technology back. The good news/bad news is that it took commerce to get it back considering those movies fabricated money…" Wild handily has commerce on its side as the megahit book almost inevitably guarantees a set-made audience. If audiences respond to the flick but every bit strongly as they do the book, which they seem to be judging by the enthusiastic reactions at TIFF, then Wild joins boyfriend 2014 films like The Fault in Our Stars, Maleficent, and Gone Girl to evidence that in that location is indeed an audience for female-driven films.

Dern'southward candid take on Wild echoes ane of the thoughts that Vallée offers during his portion of the chat. Dern says she looks frontward to the twenty-four hour period when films like Wild are merely films and not solely "women'south movies," and Vallée makes a similar betoken when a journalist at the table asks what it was similar making a female-driven motion-picture show subsequently the insufficiently male-driven films of his career. "No, I'm not a girl," he observes with practiced humour before joking that the inevitable reaction of making Wild might exist a question that he'south coming out. "I related to the material, only like the actresses," he says openly and honestly.

Vallée continues and says that he lost his mother to cancer two years prior to making Wild and that the film was a way of paying tribute to these potent women. "I just wanted to be a function of information technology and tell this great story… Cheryl's mother was just like my mother, [imitates grapheme] 'Don't worry, it'south going to work out, trust God, trust life,'" he muses while carrying that any material is essentially accessible to any artist, reader, or viewer, regardless of gender if ane gets to the universal essence of the story.

The importance of Wild's place in the journey of bringing stiff female characters to the screen couldn't exist more evident in the parallels that Vallée and Dern offer while reflecting upon the adaptation's accomplishments. "For women, I couldn't exist prouder," says Dern. "I've never seen a women—nor been part of a film where information technology ends with a adult female—with no man, no job, no money, no family, and it's a happy ending… and that's such a paradigm shift, which is great but information technology isn't always the ending." Vallée makes a similar sentiment as the conversation returns to the mystical chords of Simon & Garfunkel that offering an overture to the session and guide Bobbi and Cheryl's spirits through Wild. He remarks on why he didn't include the first line of the song, saying, "Her words were the best way to end the film, 'How wild it was to allow it exist'. And if you lot retrieve nearly it, this film is about a adult female, who has no man, who is not defining herself by a man and their relationship. She has no money, no job, and doesn't know shit what to exercise. That's the book. 'How wild information technology was to let it be.'"

Wild opens in theatres outset December five^th from Fox Searchlight Pictures.
(It opens in Ottawa Dec. 25th.)

Read the 5-star review from TIFF here.
(And enter here to win Wild prize packs!)