Benh Zeitlin on Meeting New Orleans

Co.Create: Tell me how your crush on New Orleans began. Zeitlin: Marriage, more like! That’s more a reflection of the volatility of our relationship.

How did you two meet? We met when we were children. Seriously, I went there as a kid with my parents. That was probably the crush phase. It had such an effect on me and I always had this fascination with it. I just found out that I always talked about moving there in high school. I have a terrible memory but I was hanging out with my high school girlfriend recently and talking about how different I am from how I was in high school and she told me, what are you talking about you told me you were going to move to New Orleans to make movies in tenth grade and wear a cape. She’s like you’re not wearing the cape but …

So, in 2006 you ended up returning for good?  Yeah but it wasn’t the plan to stay. I was going city to city looking for a place to make this film. It kind of took root there and then turned into something so big that I could not uproot myself.

The film is so viscerally connected to New Orleans, it’s interesting that you weren’t originally writing it with the city in mind. What was the original story?  It’s impossible to separate it from New Orleans now but that is very much something that happened when I came there. It started off as something called Glory At Sea. It had this core--it was about a shipwreck and these people that were on these shards of wood and they were looking down at people at the bottom of the water. The people on the bottom were looking up and the people on top didn’t know if they should go down and join them or stay up top. It pre-dated Katrina and all the storm stuff but when that started happening, talking to my friends there I would get this little chill that maybe this fable/myth needs to be told through something real, that it might be able to connect to what’s happening in New Orleans right now. I went there not knowing if that was going to work at all but it really exploded. The film got totally out of control. It just felt like you have a seed and you plant it in the right spot and it just grows.

Read the whole thing at Fast Company's CoCreate.

Where's Beasts Playing Next?

Beasts continues to soar! Over the next few weeks, we're opening or expanding* in 37 new cities (see list below). We're not playing in the "The Bathtub" (it's an imaginary real place, after all), but it is a place that is deeply loved and fiercely protected by its residents.  As we've brought our Bathtub to more corners of the world, you've let us know that there are many real places that are "Bathtubs" to you.

See some examples of what we're talking bout below. Email us (beasts@beastsofthesouthernwild.com) a photo or illustration of a place that you consider YOUR Bathtub, put 'Welcome to My Bathtub' in the subject line, and we'll add it to our website. Then we'll send you an official Beasts of the Southern Wild poster!
Or you could tweet it to @thebathtubber, using #mybathtub.
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To see all the cities where we're open and still going strong, visit our See the Film page!

Beasts of the Southern Wild - Sydney Morning Herald

Shooting on 16-millimetre film, the camera swings and weaves through all of this - sometimes it's as drunk as the locals - and wherever it alights, there's the sense of a living world in the rubbish and animal pens, shanty bars and salvaged vehicles. The trend in US independent cinema has been towards minimalism and empathetic quietness - actors improvising in a room at the level of the Mumblecore movement - but Beasts flies in the face of that. It's expansive, engaging and sometimes overwhelming.

With the polar ice caps melting, prehistoric creatures are roaming the land and their imminent arrival plays like the signal for a conclusion, although that's not how Hushpuppy sees it. American culture is laced with images of children communing with nature, and Hushpuppy memorably furthers a lineage that includes Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn; if there's no land, she'll just sail away

Read the whole thing at the Sydney Morning Herald.

A Must See - Huffington Post

Zeitlin's craft in constructing a world unique to his vision has created a film that viewers will forever recall as original and one of a kind. Beasts of the Southern Wild presents a world seemingly familiar to the reader but becomes completely foreign with the addition of a few simple elements. Adding to the wonder, Zeitlin's talent with visual effects is displayed in how he creates motorboats built out of truck beds, mobile homes float 15 feet above ground, and a functional town exists in the center of a swamp that appears to have no connection to the outside world.

 Read the rest at the Huffington Post.