The Girl from the Southern Wild

Elle magazine recently interviewed Beasts of The Southern Wild co-writer Lucy Alibar on her trials as a starving artist in New York City, her inspiration for writing Juicy and Delicious (the one-act play that was the springboard for Beasts), and how she managed to raise $650 dollars for a trip to Cannes. Hint: her going rate for hugs is $10.

"It was about a boy named Hushpuppy confronting the illness and death of his father, a man capable of enormous love but ­apparently ­incapable of putting that love into words.

She made Hushpuppy a boy instead of a girl because her feelings about the play’s subject were so raw. She conjured a place where ancient beasts were rampant, lemons flew through the air, and feral children ate cat food.

And then her old pal Zeitlin saw the play and told her he ­wanted to turn it into a film. And then they got support from Sundance. The 11-year-old boy became a six-year-old girl (played by the incandescent Quvenzhané Wallis), Hushpuppy and her father ­became black, the ancient beasts became the movie’s ­signature fantastical ­“aurochs,” and Georgia turned into an impoverished Mississippi River Delta community in Louisiana."

See the full interview at Elle.com.

Tribeca Film Interviews Lucy Alibar

TRIBECA: What was your initial impetus for writing Juicy and Delicious? LUCY ALIBAR: I wrote the play right when my dad was starting to get sick. Usually I’m a pretty in control person and pretty poised, but for some reason I couldn’t really process it; it really threw me for a loop. So I started writing a play about this kid named Hushpuppy losing his dad, and his world starts to fall apart in terms of time and order and space. Grits start raining down from the sky and the Aurochs start coming out of these caves through the red clay of Georgia to devour schoolchildren, and the teacher and the father are trying to prepare the children for the end of the world when there aren’t any grown-ups left and they’re not children anymore.

Looking back on it, I think I was writing about me not being a child anymore—figuring out how I’m actually going to live through that. Because you can’t be a child if there aren’t any grown-ups, and I felt like my grown-ups were falling away. So that was the start. Benh liked the story, and he liked the Aurochs, and he liked the characters.

He wanted to do his first feature with these characters and storylines, [but set] it in south Louisiana where the ground is actually sinking. He was shooting [his short film] Glory at Sea  at that time—that was how he came to New Orleans—and we drove down to the end of a road in Louisiana and found a spot, which is where we put The Bathtub. He really wanted to make a movie on that land, where it’s actually sinking.

Read the whole interview at Tribeca Film.