Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari’s work has always defied easy classification. In Harvest, her fourth and most ambitious feature, villager accents and clothing, along with their remote island setting, actively work to prevent an audience from zeroing in on a precise setting or time. Moving fluidly between genres, the film could be said to recall Westerns in theme and material content, examining how modernization threatens simpler ways of living. Meanwhile, the film’s logline invokes folk horror in its tease of an unnamed village that will disappear at the end of a “hallucinatory” week — a setup that also draws to mind the Roanoke colony disappearance.
Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) is our window into this enclosed world, a sensitive, nature-loving lad who peacefully co-exists with the sheep farmers. The arrival of outsiders forces Thirsk to contend with the threatened villagers closing ranks, a move which excludes him. Here the narrative shifts from a Malickian New World-esque look at the entwined beauty and harshness of living off the land, into something more closely resembling a Lars Von Trier picture in which the cruelty and cowardice of humankind is on full display.
Drawing inspiration from a variety of sources, Tsangari’s reference list of almost 50 films she shared with cast and crew runs the gamut from revisionist Westerns like The Great Silence and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, to quieter films with docufiction elements like The Tree of Wooden Clogs and La Terra Trema, alongside more contemporary works like Zama and the HBO series Deadwood. After working together on the BBC series Trigonometry, Tsangari and cinematographer Sean Price Williams reteam, and the resulting 16mm images are some of the DP’s most beautiful yet, up there with his work on Tesla and Heaven Knows What. Out now in select theaters, Harvest is available to stream on MUBI this Friday. I spoke with Tsangari over Zoom where we discussed putting a 16mm camera on a drone, never watching dailies, and conducting a makeshift band comprised of Oscar-winning sound designer Nicolas Becker, Caleb Landry Jones, and Tsangari’s husband.
Caleb Hammond: You’re shooting in rural Scotland on film, with a large cast, without the backing of a big studio. How do you choose what to prioritize? Is it time with your actors, for instance, or working with your DP Sean Price Williams?
Athina Rachel Tsangari: It’s a very symbiotic process. I don’t do coverage per se, but everyone knows each other, because we’ve all been together rehearsing for more than a month before we start shooting. You don’t have this feeling of starting from scratch, when you get to set and actors haven’t met each other, and directors haven’t met their actors, outside of maybe a Zoom. The shoot was difficult due to the terrain, the weather, and the complexity of everything that was happening. It seemed much bigger than anything I had done before, but in a way it was the easiest film, in terms of the organic synchronicity of everything.
CH: Are you getting dailies?
ARS: We would get them every two days from London, and Sean would watch them religiously with his team. I don’t watch dailies, because I don’t want to break the spell which I enter when I start shooting and which ends after wrap. Editor Matt Johnson made an assembly on location. I’ve worked with him for 20 years, and he knows that I don’t like watching rushes unless there is a definitive issue. He might tell me if there is a part that we didn’t shoot, and then I have to remember if it’s a decision I made, or if it’s something that, in this trance while we’re shooting several pages a day, we just didn’t get. Only twice did we go back and reshoot something.
CH: It’s such a beautiful film. What was your process working with Sean Price Williams? I understand he prefers to explore the space and find the shot on the day.
ARS: I came to him with a substantial mood board, having researched the look of the film for about a year. Once you look at a director’s mood board, you sense immediately what the direction is. I wanted to go from tactile close-ups to big tableaux, with nothing really in between. I’m quite involved on set. With my little monitor right next to him, we move together. It’s not a vocal collaboration, which is a relief for both of us, because we don’t like talking or negotiating on set. We had worked together on Trigonometry and a couple of other things, and we’ve been friends for a long time. And Sean had worked with Caleb and Thalissa Teixeira as well. It was an ideal collaboration. He works very intuitively, and is extremely respectful with the actors. He would never stop for light. For both of us, there is never this preciousness to capture the perfect shot. It’s this accumulation of a shared spirit and mood that we established, which extended to the entire crew.
CH: Where did the idea to put a 16mm camera on a drone come from?
ARS: Well, we were shooting on 16mm, so that’s the camera that we put on the drone. We’re not going to break that. I don’t know if the drone operators knew beforehand that they were going to have to do that [laughs.] I didn’t have very many shots in the script. This specific shot is a narrative beat for Walt when, for the first time with his mind’s eye, he sees the world from above. So that was actually in the script, and is one of only a few shots that Sean and I specifically prepared.
The other was the shot of the burning barn. Initially, it was a single shot that we choreographed the hell out of. We got it in the fourth take and had two busted takes. We only had a few hours to shoot, and it was a really beautiful oner. But it was just too beautiful, so I didn’t use it as a oner. Ben Rivers was actually there, shooting the opposite way in a Ben Rivers documentary way, documenting this crazy chaos with all of the cast and the burning and pigeons. It was such a beautiful feat of teamwork to get it right. We all celebrated together once we got it — it was almost dawn. In the end, I broke it apart because it was just too perfect.
CH: Your work frequently plays with genre. Is this movie a folk horror? Is it a Western? Genre immediately creates audience expectations about where a narrative might go, which allows a director the ability to then mess around with those expectations.
ARS: I saw it as a Western, but my kind of Western. Intuitively, when I know that there’s a film that I’m definitely going to make — and it takes some time to decide this — as a way to anchor my thoughts, my brain immediately goes to a genre that I then destroy. Revisionist westerns of the ’70s were a big inspiration along with hallucinatory Eastern European films. I had a list of about 50 films that I put on a drive and shared with everyone.
Harvest is probably not a Western. It’s not folk horror either. It has elements of both. It’s not really a drama. I always try to work in some humor, some tragic comedy. I don’t care, to tell you the truth. What it is in the end is just what it wants to become. It acquires a mind of its own. I’m not being metaphysical about it, but the way we work is in a quite fluid way — I don’t like to do shot lists and I don’t like to have very strict references. For example, the costumes belong to which era? They could be worn today in Scotland, Mexico, or Japan. I’m not precious about stuff like that.
CH: I mentioned the cinematography, but what’s striking about the film is how cohesive all the elements are. The score is a big part of that. Like the costumes being out of place and time, the score has that feeling as well. At times it’s synthy, and at others it has a wind-up music box quality.
ARS: It was an on-the-spot collaboration between Caleb, who is a fantastic musician; Nicolas Becker, our sound designer and composer; Ian Hassett, my husband, who is a musician; and Lexx, the amazing music producer who has been working with Nicolas on several projects. The original idea was to bring ’70s synths with analog instruments and try not to have anything that’s folky about it. So Nicolas brought his collection of handmade instruments that he’s been collecting to London. And then we just played with pianos, violins, guitars, and strange percussions. We had only a few days in the studio. We had to finish the music to go to Venice. It was an improv — we’re doing it live. I found myself in the middle conducting, but I was conducting tonality and temperature, having watched the scenes a million times. It was an experience that I never have had as a director. It was amazing to not have it where after you’ve been editing the film, the soundtrack comes, and you have to fit it, negotiate it. Sometimes you don’t like it at all. What do you do then? Do you fire the composer and go back to your source music? I didn’t have any of these dilemmas. And then there was also the whole relationship with local musicians in Oban, in western Scotland, for the music that we use for the harvest and the dance. We worked with Gary West, an etymologist from Edinburgh, to figure out all of the Gaelic songs that were quite pagan. And then we found all of those 14- to 15-year-old musicians in the area. He rehearsed with them, and they are onscreen as villagers. That was live music playing in the dance scene.
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