James Beard Q&A with Josh Penn: Food & Beasts

The James Beard Foundation interviewed producer Josh Penn about the role of food in Beasts of the Southern Wild and within film in general.

JP: So much of the culture in the Louisiana bayou is about food, and more specifically, living off the water. It’s intertwined with everything, it defines the community, and is something that we really wanted to capture. Our first day of shooting was actually the day of the BP oil spill. Most people in the area live off the water in some way or another, and the spill threatened their entire lifestyle—because whether or not it’s your livelihood, it’s still the source of what you eat. It’s what’s all around you. It really underscored how food is interwoven into every aspect of life there. And the approach to food and how it should be eaten would obviously be different if we were telling a story about another community. I’m sure they eat crabs pretty differently on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Read the full interview here.

Reel Lives New York and South Africa Q&A

Reel Lives is a New York and South Africa-based non-profit filmmaking program for marginalized, refugee and war-affected youth.  Groups from both NY and South Africa made trips to see the film and were joined virtually afterwards by Producer Josh Penn for a live Q&A via Google Hangouts. Excerpts of the Q&A between the Reel Lives participants in South Africa, Beasts Outreach Coordinator Clara and Producer Josh Penn are watchable above along with footage from their trip!

Josh spoke about where the title of Beasts came from, the father-daughter relationship between Hushpuppy and Wink, finding Quvenzhané Wallis in Houma and running lines with Dwight Henry in the bakery late into the night.

Meanwhile the Reel Lives NY crew was following along too!  Check out more photos from their end here.

Find out more about Reel Lives by checking out their website and Facebook.

Beasts Has Roots in Obama '08

Before Michael Gottwald, Dan Janvey and Josh Penn were Oscar nominated producers, they were working the ground as grassroots organizers for then Presidential hopeful Barack Obama. While their political persuasions stayed out of the conception and creation of Beasts, they did use their community focused grassroots experience to inform the casting, promotion and outreach on the film.

They recently spoke to Buzzfeed about how working on the Obama '08 campaign helped them to produce Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Early on, they saw similarities between the production environment in post-Katrina Louisiana and the Presidential campaign.

“We purposely had everybody stay in the bayou in housing that was provided by locals: fishing camps, mobile homes,” Gottwald said, comparing the living environment to that experienced by campaign organizers. “Instead of having it be very distant, we purposefully had a headquarters where everybody could come, where we had meals every day, where everyone wanted to be. We had this shared kind of spirit.”

When it came to casting the film, the three producers shied away from traditional casting methods and the film school wisdom that told them to seek out big name actors. Penn saw this as a direct extension of the naïve, hopeful approach he needed while he was working for Obama’s campaign. In 2008, he believed in the impossible, and he was doing so again with this film.

Read the full article on Buzzfeed.