Beasts on Award Season

Tonight marks the official start of what the film industry calls awards season, beginning with the New York based fete, the IFP Gotham Film Awards.  Beasts is nominated for 3 awards including the Gotham Audience Award, which is the most important one for us considering your contribution to our nomination!

We are humbled to be part of the awards conversation and so excited for the actors and crew who are being recognized for their work on Beasts. Beyond the accolades, awards season buzz allows us to get more coverage about the movie and ultimately share it with a larger audience.

Quvenzhané Wallis and Benh Zeitlin were recently interviewed about awards season for the November issue of The Wrap where Benh had this to say about his star:

"You know she takes it in stride...She doesn't have this ultimate goal in life to win this and that if it doesn't happen it's a disaster.  And her parents keep her grounded.  She's not doing campaigning during the week.  She's staying in school and not letting it take over her life.  I think she's starting to sense what it means, but not in a way that it feels like she has to stop being herself or stop living the life that she already has."

Read the full article here.

The Story Behind Beasts

This month's issue of The Hollywood Reporter features a great behind the scenes look at Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Including this anecdote from Director Benh Zeitlin, who was traveling from New Orleans to Austin for a screening of his short Glory at Seain 2008 when his car was rear ended by a drunk driver.

"It was 5 in the morning, and we were at a stoplight, and the driver was drunk and ran into us at full speed," he recalls. "I was in the back seat, and the collision collapsed it into the front seat, like an accordion. It turned my leg backward and shattered my pelvis, and I had to move back to New York for eight months. And that was when I started writing Beasts."

Inspired by the stage play, Juicy and Delicious, written by childhood friend, Lucy Alibar, Benh and Lucy spent the next year hammering out the script that would become Beasts of the Southern Wild.  A year and a half later, the film was heading into pre-production.

The piece continues:

"Nearly four years after the car accident that launched him on this strange and magical journey, he (BZ) was whisked onto a plane where he fell into a profound sleep, effectively waking in a theater where he was able to see his work before an audience for the first time.

"People went crazy," he recalls. "But I thought, maybe that's the way they always behaved, because I'd never been to a premiere before."

Read the full article from The Hollywood Reporter here.

Quvenzhané Wallis on the cover of Los Angeles Times' The Envelope

Quvenzhané Wallis is featured on the cover of today's Los Angeles Times' Award Season Preview issue of The Envelope! Journalist John Horn sat down with Quvenhzané, director Benh Zeitlin and her high school teacher mother Qulyndreia Wallis to discuss Quvenzhané's first Beasts audition, mastering a New York accent for the upcoming Steve McQueen film, Twelve Years a Slave, and how she's handling the award season buzz.

"Look, you got another nomination, but it doesn't mean you won," Qulyndreia said after daughter was shortlisted for the Gotham award. "We're taking this one day at a time and see what happens."

Read the full article below or here.

Hurricane Sandy

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the stories of homes and lives lost to the storm weigh heavily on our hearts.

After a screening and Q&A in Queens, New York this past weekend, The Wall Street Journal asked Benh Zeitlin (a native New Yorker) about the hurricane and its timely connection to Beasts.

WSJ: Hurricane Sandy left many communities around here devastated. In “Beasts,” a woman from the Bathtub warns young kids about the future of our planet.

BZ: For me, this film wasn’t about the past, it was about the future. When I was writing the film it was in 2008 when we had Gustav and Ike, really bad hurricanes not in New Orleans but in the South where we shot the film. It was inspired by a moment of just realizing that storms used to come every 100 years, then they came every 50 years, now it’s like every three years. It was really about a future where storms are a perpetual threat.

I do feel South Louisiana is the first place to deal with this, but that’s what it is, the first. The world is changing, the planet is changing, and this is something that’s going to become a big part of everybody’s lives. It’s crazy to come up here and see the same thing happen in a place where no one was prepared for it or expecting it.

WSJ: Have people mentioned to you that “Beasts” resonates even more now, post-Sandy?

BZ: Somebody just came in a second ago, he was out in Rockaway today. I was down in Red Hook today helping people clean up. I think it’s going to change the conversation about the film. In Louisiana, people have internalized that this is happening and that they have to survive. Now that’s going to be here too, and it’s not the last story. Part of the reason we made the film as a fable and not as a documentary is that we wanted it to be a story that could travel and be universal and apply to people who live in all kinds of different places because it’s something everyone’s going to have to deal with. -- BZ

What do you think? Share your comments below.

And, if you are interested in helping the relief effort through donating goods, volunteering or providing financial aid, we've found these resources, here, here and here, to be helpful.

(Image via Tim Larsen/New Jersey Governor's Office)

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.