by Athina Rachel Tsangari, the Greek director with roots in New York and Austin, Texas, does not need any convincing when an actor or crew member proposes an offbeat idea.
Her new film “Harvest” is based on Jim Crace’s interior monologue of a novel and set in the unspecified past. It feels like the middle ages, apart from the occasional anachronism. On the ramshackle set in Scotland, most of the characters were wearing wooden clogs, but Tsangari’s lead actor Caleb Landry Jones (best known to audiences as the brother in “Get Out;” he also won a Cannes prize in 2021 for the drama “Nitram”) strolled up in contemporary hiking boots.
“I loved it,” the director tells TheWrap of Jones’ footwear. “I’m open to stuff like that. It has nothing to do with what people were wearing in medieval times, but it works. Especially in a film like this one, which has a fable-like quality and where we’re asking the audience to go on this adventure.”
Tsangari added, “Caleb had lots to do in the film, lots of stomping in the fields, and it would have actually been dangerous for him in clogs. We found boots that were comfortable.”
“Harvest” tells the story of a small village and how it destroys itself from within. The main cast is mostly men, a fact that Tsangari addresses below in our conversation. Alongside Jones as a philosophic peasant, the movie also features Nigerian-British actor Arinzé Kene as a mapmaker, whose presence in the village serves as an incitement to the drama; Harry Melling as a nobleman and Frank Dillane as a sinister outsider.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and then screened at festivals in Toronto, New York, Busan, Mumbai and London. This weekend, it’s being shown as part of the AFI Fest in Los Angeles.
“I’m always exploring the themes of power or loss of power,” Tsangari said. “‘Harvest’ is about anemic people who don’t do anything, even when they’re facing the end. How can you watch people do nothing? What happens when a kind of malaise settles in and people are unable to react to something or even recognize that it’s evil.”
After an opening prologue, the film begins with a big barn on fire, as we see the villagers try to douse the flames. They are panicked, but as characters furiously spin a water wheel, the scene unfolds like a spectacular dance.
“That’s how we choreographed it,” Tsangari explained. “It’s the first time that I worked with a choreographer — Holly Blakey, who I really admire. She worked with us on that opening fire scene, with all the men turning the water wheel, but also in other parts of the film: The harvest in the field, the men in the pillory. My background is in performance studies and it felt so incredible to have everyone so in sync in a physical sense. Now I don’t think I can ever work without Holly again.”
Tsangari and her cinematographer, the NYC-based Sean Price Williams (“The Sweet East”), had originally storyboarded the opening barn-fire sequence as one long continuous shot, without any cuts.
“I had worked with Sean on a TV series called ‘Trigonometry,’ where we shot 70 or 80 percent of an episode in one shot. On that, we spent the whole day rehearsing and then we shot it in three takes. It was an incredible experience, where the rehearsal is the most important aspect.”
But with “Harvest,” she did five takes of the long shot, yet had second thoughts in the editing room. “We were not getting the energy right,” Tsangari said. “Because this was where we introduce many of the film’s characters and the viewer was not getting it. So we chose the best parts of the five takes, edited them together, and Sean was the first one to say, ‘It works better.’ He’s not precious. He’s all about tactility and what works best.”
In addition to directing features and shorts, Tsangari also designed video projections for the opening ceremony of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens and produced features by fellow Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos (including his Oscar-nominated “Dogtooth”) and the American indie master Richard Linklater.
Her connection to Linklater stretches back nearly 35 years. One day in 1990, while in Austin to study at the University of Texas, she stumbled randomly into an audition as Linklater was casting parts for his debut film. Tsangari landed a role in “Slacker.” The two have remained friends and she co-produced (and appeared in another small role) in the Greece-set “Before Midnight.”
“Harvest” is Tsangari’s second consecutive film to feature a male cast, after the bold comedy-drama “Chevalier,” about six men on a luxury yacht. When that film was released in 2015, she remembered that critics were overly focused on her interest in the male psyche and toxic masculinity.
“I just think that’s so silly,” she shared. “It’s so reductive, all these labels. There is an inherent sexism to think that I have to explain why I spend too much time showing men on the screen. I’m a female filmmaker and so I’m supposed to stay in my lane and make films about women? John Cassavetes made some of most complex, beautiful films about women – did anyone ever ask why didn’t he focus instead on men?”
She also points out that before making “Chevalier” and “Harvest,” she directed a short film called “The Capsule,” which was about seven women. Her planned next feature, currently in the script-development stage, will have a female protagonist. And if the project happens, it will mark a return to cinema of someone who has been off screen for several years.
Tsangari did not reveal the name, but did say that her collaborator is “an American actor I’ve long admired and we’ve been developing this together.”
“It’s been an inspiring process of discussions and shared research between her and I for the past two years,” she added. “I normally re-write the script during the rehearsal stage, but in this case, the first draft is informed by our workshopping her character. I really hope it happens.”
