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| To Kill A Wolf |
Director Kelsey Taylor's feature début, To Kill A Wolf, photographed by her writing collaborator and cinematographer Adam Lee, reimagines the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale to explore trauma and redemption.
Somewhere in the Oregon wilderness, a reclusive Woodsman (Ivan Martin) comes across Dani (Maddison Brown), a runaway teenager. He rescues her and gives her food and shelter. The pair struggle to communicate. Both are troubled souls, carrying with them a heavy past. When the Woodsman agrees to drive Dani to her grandmother's, the pair strike up an unexpected connection. They begin to share with one another secrets that signal the end of the beginning, more than a departure.
Taylor and Lee's short films include 2019's Alien: Specimen, produced as part of a 20th Century initiative, and the 2023 western, Alone In Tombstone for the Southwest Airlines brand, about a young woman in search of her identity in a town frozen in time.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Taylor and Lee discussed peeling back the fairy tale's simple moral to explore a complicated, reimagined truth, challenging themselves to work differently, and the unpredictable journey the story took.
Paul Risker: Why film as a means of creative expression? Was there an inspirational or defining moment for you personally?
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| Ivan Martin as the Woodsman |
Kelsey Taylor: I grew up on books more than on film and television. My parents were very much, "No, you get this one hour, once a week." So, I loved books and when I read, I'd inherently imagine how you bring it to life. That is what got me started early on with the adaptation sensibility, and I love that filmmaking is a way of curating the perspective that you see. With a book there's the unreliable narrator, of course, but with filmmaking you can hone in on what someone sees, how it unfolds and how you can manipulate what people feel. I always admired this, and I wanted to imitate it, and now, here we are, hopefully achieving that.
Adam Lee: I spent a lot of time as a child reading manga and watching anime. I'm always interested in how, visually, a single image can encapsulate an entire feeling, and the flow and movement of things. Growing up, filmmaking was something I always felt drawn to, and I naturally gravitated towards the lighting aspect and the way you visually put something together to create a feeling and a world.
Kelsey and I are into world building, through filmmaking and the films we enjoy and aspire to make. Personally, the way I can help and contribute is through the camera and lighting, and there's so much you can capture between those two things that is hard to put your finger on, but you can't help but feel it.
Bringing it back To Kill A Wolf, we didn't have a lot of money, but we tried to make a world and create this visual experience that was unique to itself. We also played on the strengths we had, and as a cinematographer, I'm drawn to world building through the use of light, camera, and movement.
PR: World building is not only physical, but also emotional. We can't talk about this film without considering the emotional side of the story.
KT: I truly hope so because we talk about emotional continuity a lot. Not so interested in real continuity, but the emotional continuity of things is really important. We'd even talk about small details like phones in modern movies and how they are seen. We wanted this film to be as timeless as possible, and even with this girl running away in the woods, how do you make sure people don't question that? For a long time we thought no one is going to believe she was running away in the woods, but if you build a world around it, then you can make sure they believe it.
AL: The title, To Kill a Wolf, is obviously a metaphor. It's interesting that we can have Dani and the Woodsman going through a similar journey in their redemption arcs. They obviously have very different backgrounds and are in different places in their lives, but the emotional continuity of coming to terms with their own shame, in their own way, probably speaks to a lot of people's reactions to the film.
This film isn't for everyone, but for the people it does speak to, this element of shame and what it looks like to face and move past that, is what those people tap into. And that looks different for each person, given their experiences.
The emotional world of this film is using the parable of Little Red Riding Hood to talk about how people in everyday situations can come to face whatever it is that haunts them - the shame of straying from the path, as everyone does in some way.
PR: What was the genesis of the film, and what compelled you to believe in this story and tell it now?
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| Maddison Brown as Dani |
KT: As an artist does, you sometimes get locked on an idea. I'm curious, and I just want to know more. When people ask how I came to this, I just got hung up on it. There was something here, and we were not exactly sure what would manifest, but we were reimagining Little Red Riding Hood, a fairy tale that's so simple. It's black and white - the moral is 'don't stray from the path.' But what is the complicated truth behind that? This is what we started thinking about, and there are a lot of ways for that to unfold.
In some earlier drafts, and I joked about this because Little Red Riding Hood was going to kill the hunter. It was about the hunter being a bad guy, and how does she set herself free? It was a female empowerment story. I love where we've ended up now because it gives everyone more humanity. It's a more interesting story than what we had originally started with. But adaptation wise, I like trying to surprise people and to subvert expectations, like seeing someone you think you know, but you don't. I love people to put themselves in someone else's shoes and I hope we've done that with this film.
AL: Talking about subverting and changing things, Red Riding Hood has four-character archetypes: Red, the Woodsman, the Wolf and the grandma. A lot of discussion went into that ahead of time, and honestly, probably more of it has happened after the fact, about taking those archetypes and trying to mess with people's understanding.
What if the Wolf had a complicated relationship outside his relationship with Dani? What if the Woodsman had done some bad things too, and he was trying to figure these out? What if Red, not to say she's culpable, but can't help but feel that she played some part in her own undoing? Messing with those archetypes is interesting and the chapters throughout the film were originally intended to delineate those roles. We found there is something interesting about giving the audience that framework to let them come to it with an expectation, to see it, and to then come away with a new understanding or perhaps a better definition of what that archetype might be.
KT: You can watch this film and not know it's Red Riding Hood and I hope it still works, but seeing it through that lens is more interesting to me.
PR: The film opens in a way that immediately piques our curiosity as to who Dani is, and why she is running? The opening of a film is important because it confronts the critical consideration of how you bring the audience into the world of the film. How much thought do you put into the opening of a story?
KT: When we're writing, and we write a lot together, one of the first questions is always what's the opening image? How are we starting this? What are we saying? Sad to say, the opening image we wrote in the script did not end up being the opening image. We did not have the sequence we have now at the very beginning, instead, it was just a shot in the woods and the car comes through.
We thought it was important to start in the quiet stillness and we originally bookended the film with a shot where Dani and the Woodsman are reunited. They drive away together in the car, and it ends in stillness. But you go through the edit process, and you ask what makes sense for the edit, and what makes sense for the story? We ended up not having that at all, which is kind of sad. The important thing is how you draw people in, and we felt it was important to get both of their stories up front immediately because hers takes a long time to unfold.
PR: Watching All We Imagine As Light, director Payal Kapadia, allows the characters to reveal themselves. Often, characters are exposed, their power is taken away by the storyteller. Similarly to Kapadia, you allow Dani and the Woodsman to reveal themselves, and in so doing you embrace their vulnerability and empower them.
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| A fairy tale encounter |
AL: We deliberately scheduled the days at the beginning so they worked separately, and they didn't interact until the scene where they first meet. It was for scheduling but also emotional purposes. The scene they meet is stilted; it's a little uncomfortable, and it's very silent. This relationship between a weird recluse and a vulnerable young girl is incredibly uncomfortable and awkward. But people sometimes don't know how to, or they don't have the experience to talk to one another.
In the edit process, it made people uncomfortable - they were like, "I want to know." That discomfort with the reality of the situation lends itself to the naturalism of those weird interactions. As the filmmaking went on, and Ivan and Maddison got to know one another better, it did develop this. Not to say it was an antagonistic relationship, but there was this loving banter but also a lot of jabs between them.
They're both very different people and in the way they interacted, a mutual respect grew. There was this weird friendship between people of different generations who come from different worlds, but they align in this one way in pursuit of these characters. That relationship opened up in the filmmaking process, as it did in the narrative.
To your point, there's good fun to be had with those weird and awkward interactions, and if you start with unease, you can end with openness. And naturally, through the course of the narrative, their performances let audiences feel that growth.
PR: The cinematography also needs to respect the emotional nuance of the characters. In moments, you want to be close, but there are other moments when you need distance to respect the characters, who are slowly revealing themselves.
AL: Kelsey is a former cinematographer herself and on set, the cinematography, the frames, the lighting, was a tight collaboration. I feel we both naturally found the language of the film as it evolved. But there was something about the stillness that we liked - using the framing of the cabin, of these empty houses, and looking through archways and reflections helped give these characters context and let them be the motion in the frame. We tried not to move the camera as much as possible, and we tried to find as many frames to let the characters interact.
KL: Adam and I are usually very calculated filmmakers. Everything is note-boarded, and we'll do it with animatics. Most of our stuff we cut together ahead of time, and with this we made the extra effort to say, "No, let the actors do what they do, and we will figure out the shots around them." For us it was an interesting experience, and I learned a lot by doing it that way.
AL: When you give the actors the freedom to occupy the space, it takes on new meaning. Hopefully, we are there capturing it, but of course there's movie magic going on. I spoke about our limited resources, but we were a nimble light crew, so we were able to move quickly, and be able to be at the location at the right time to catch the light. It had that slight bit of magic, and that's hard to do on a movie set - to move the [human] machine.
We work on much bigger commercial productions to pay the bills, and it's a different exercise than when you're working on an intimate story. Something about that comes through in the cinematography. It's something connected to the performance, and it feels simple but just right.
PR: In adapting Little Red Riding Hood, you spoke about commenting on trauma in your director's statement. Winston Churchill used the phrase "the end of the beginning." These words are a fitting way to describe the film, which honours trauma by looking at it as an unpredictable and potentially lifelong journey.
KT: That was the goal. If this is the beginning, now we can move past it. For people that have suffered through something who have experience of trauma, it's about how do you move forward? How do you get back on that path? And that's where it ties so well with Little Red Riding Hood.
The hunter says, "You're going to mess up," but it's about what you do after. It's so on the nose when he says it, but what comes next? How do you get past it? For me, it's with other people. Being able to speak about it and to be able to share it is important, but in your own time. And maybe you don't even need to speak about it. We have two characters that deal with it differently, so, hopefully, that covers everyone, and people can find themselves in either character.
To Kill A Wolf premiered at the 2024 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Next it will play at the Mill Valley Film Festival and the Austin Film Festival.
