By Iain Blair
Over her career, actress Robin Wright has worked with many of Hollywood’s top directors, including Rob Reiner, David Fincher, Robert Zemeckis and M. Night Shyamalan. But while performing in front of the camera, this award-winning actress has also been quietly building her directing resume. In addition to playing the formidable Claire Underwood in House of Cards, Wright served as an executive producer and directed several episodes over all six seasons, including the Season 6 series finale.
Robin Wright and Bobby Bukowski
Now Wright has directed her first feature film, Land, in which she also stars as the lead character. It’s a powerful and confident debut and a beautifully shot and directed movie that follows the journey of Edee Holzer (Wright). Newly widowed and stunned by tragedy, Edee jettisons her old life in exchange for a spartan cabin and a solitary existence in the remote mountain wilderness of Wyoming.
I recently spoke with Wright about making and posting the film.
Seems like you jumped in the deep end with this as your feature directorial debut, especially considering the challenges of the location?
Yes, it was anything but easy, but I didn’t really have time to worry about it in that way. By the time we got financing, we had a very slim window to cast it and move to Canada, especially as we had to cover four seasons in just a 29-day shoot.
Clint Eastwood has often directed himself, but he told me “it’s never easy.” How tough was it?
Clint’s right. I don’t want to say it’s double the workload, but it’s very challenging, and you have no time for self-absorption, like, “Am I going to be able to rehearse all my scenes? Will I achieve the emotional depth needed?” You don’t really have time to ponder all that.
Jumping behind the camera felt more like a job, and it’s definitely not as torturous as acting, as you’re not sitting in a trailer by yourself locked in emotions and waiting for your call. You’re constantly moving, and your mind’s constantly spinning about the next scene and wondering, “Will we have enough light?” Your adrenalin is so high, and it felt like turning a light on and off.
How did you prep for your movie directorial debut?
My main prep was with my DP, Bobby Bukowski, and that collaboration was key to this. We had many meetings and watched movies that had inspired us, and we talked in depth about how we wanted it to feel and look when this character has all these elliptical memories.
We’d share a lot as we were picking the shot lists and lenses and so on. He was very big on mood boards, so we’d get to see how scenes would look and feel. And nature is also a character in the film throughout, but at the start, Edee doesn’t really see it or take it in. It’s just there, and very cruel, as nature can be. So we wanted that to look very different from later on, when she’s communing with nature and appreciating the majesty of her surroundings.
Bobby’s a great outdoorsman and he loves nature, and he really understood what we needed to capture in terms of nature. He even slept in Edee’s cabin on top of the mountain for most of the shoot, while my producer and I stayed in trailers behind it so we could all live the movie we were shooting — and be right in the middle of storms and so on. If one hit at 3am, he’d grab his camera, head outside and get a timelapse shot.
Where did you shoot, and how tough was the shoot?
In the mountains of Calgary, Canada, 7,000 feet up, and it was brutal. The big challenge was, we never knew what to expect with the weather, and that area’s well-known for very unpredictable weather. So we had to be ready to constantly reschedule stuff on a daily basis. We’d be in shorts and T-shirts shooting a summer scene, and suddenly we’d get word the Chinook winds were coming —they can be 70mph — so we’d have to shut down for an hour or so and wait for it to pass. Sometimes we’d get three seasons in one day, or rain no one had predicted, so it was constant change and reshuffling and a very busy set. We shot on ARRI Alexas, and of course equipment jammed and broke down because of the extreme cold. Technicolor in Toronto handled the digital dailies.
Tell us about post. Where did you do it?
We began in New York at Harbor, but halfway through COVID hit and we had to shut down. So everyone flew home, and I had to finish post remotely via Zoom. That was very hard as I’d never gone through editing and sound and color grading like that.
Robin Wright on set
It was very difficult. Even so, I really love post, especially the editing, because you can completely transform the whole movie. That’s where you can totally rework the story and enhance it or make it sparer. And this was quite a Rubik’s Cube. After the first edit, we all decided not to give away all the “events” at the top, which is not how it was in the script, where you got to witness the events at the top of the story. I just felt, let’s have faith in the audience. They’ll have patience and lean into what happened to this woman.
You had two editors — Anne McCabe and Mikkel Nielsen. How did you all work together, and what were the main editing challenges?
They didn’t work together. I began in the room with Anne at Harbor, and when we started screening it for friends and colleagues, I found that everyone had a different opinion about the structure. So I had to stop showing it for a while, as it wasn’t helping me. Then Mikkel came in and offered to give it a shot with fresh eyes. He trimmed the fat — all the exposition and scenes we’d shot of her past life — that ultimately just took you out of the film. We didn’t need them. So the big challenge was finding the core of the story and keeping it true and simple.
Can you talk about the importance of sound to you?
We did the sound at C5 Inc. in New York and the score and mix at Germano Studios. Both were crucial, as there’s very little dialogue in many scenes. We had a lot of discussion about it because I wanted every sound that nature delivers to be extremely loud at the start, like it’s this enemy to her. But as she begins to understand nature more and becomes more equal with it, it starts to mellow. Sound supervisor Paul Hsu and his team did a great job of capturing all that.
There are a few VFX by Moving Target. What was entailed?
They did a lot of work with the bear sequence; we had a real trained bear, but it wasn’t safe on the location because there were lots of wild bears in the area. There was a lot of work on the blizzard, as the day we shot it was warm with blue skies, and of course a lot of cleanup and removal work.
How was it working on the DI at Harbor Post with colorist Joe Gawler?
It was my first DI, so I relied a lot on Joe, and it was fascinating but also a bit weird because it was all remote. I was in Harbor in LA and he was in Harbor New York, and Joe and Bobby played with the palette and got a very beautiful look. [Gawler used Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve for the grade.]
What sort of film did you set out to make?
It’s a story of hope and resilience and how we all need human connection to get through the hard times, and I think it’s a message that is really timely right now with the pandemic.
Did it turn out the way you first envisioned it?
Yes and no. It changed radically in many ways because we moved the puzzle pieces around so many different ways in the edit. We also ended up shooting the opening scene after we’d edited the film, along with the driving montages.
Do you want to direct again?
Yes! I can’t wait, and I’m about to direct some of Season 4 of Ozark for Netflix. It’s so exciting.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
