Meeting with the directors of Primitifs, an absurd and poetic comedy about a Bigfoot family

This film by the Zellner brothers, with Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, opened the Champs-Elysées Film Festival.

Name: Zellner. First names: Nathan and David. Two filmmaker brothers like there are so many in the history of cinema, from Lumière to Safdie. We don't yet know them very well in France, where their films have never been distributed until now. Neither Kumiko, the treasure hunter (2014), about a Japanese woman obsessed with Fargo (another film by brother filmmakers), nor Damsel (2018), a western with Robert Pattinson and Mia Wasikowska. However, their IMDb profile is as long as an arm, and is full of unidentified feature films, short films with obscure titles, participation in various web series and clips for Texan groups. Recently, they signed three episodes of the very high series The Cursewith Emma Stone (to be seen on Paramount +), thus confirming their increasingly central place in the galaxy of new weirdos on the American indie scene.

We should soon better understand the Zellner brothers thanks to Primitives (a.k.a Sasquatch Sunset in original version), announced for the coming months in French cinemas, and which opened the Champs-Elysées Film Festival a few days ago. Produced by Ari Aster's company (the director of Beau is afraid is always ready to support marginal oddities tinged with absurdity and humor cringe), Primitives is a comic and poetic UFO which follows the journey, over an entire year, of a family of Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, these legendary creatures of the North American forests, a sort of Yankee equivalent of the Yeti.

Met during their visit to Paris, the two brothers, David (also a screenwriter) and Nathan (who plays one of the furry animals in the film, alongside Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough) explained to us how they designed this unclassifiable film, which quickly goes beyond funny surrealism à la Quentin Dupieux to abandon itself to a bucolic languor that is quite hypnotizing.

First: Where does your fascination with the myth of Bigfoot come from?

David Zellner: It all starts with this famous amateur film from the end of the 60s, the Patterson/Gimlin film, which we have known since our childhood, like any American kid who grew up in the 70s and 80s. It is allegedly the image of a Bigfoot, you know, we see him walking in the woods, and he seems to be turning towards the camera. This silhouette has become famous all over the world… Bigfoot has become a big fixture in pop culture. Lots of films and TV shows have been dedicated to him. We were immersed in it. And we developed a slight fascination with the question. Fascination which was also nourished by what we call the “monkey cinema” of the 60s and 70s, with The Planet of the Apes and its sequels, but also the opening sequence of 2001, A Space Odyssey“The Dawn of Humanity”.

And The fire war by Jean-Jacques Annaud, does that mean something to you?

David Zellner: Of course ! Quest for fire ! We loved it as kids. It is clearly one of our influences, engraved somewhere in our unconscious. The Bear also was very important. What attracted me to The fire war when I discovered it, that's how nothing was watered down. And this is in a certain way what we wanted to reproduce in Primitives. This way of making cinema that was not at all sanitized was striking. That, and saber-toothed tigers!

How difficult is it to finance a film without dialogue whose actors, although famous, are unrecognizable because they are disguised as hairy animals?

David Zellner: It's, uh, almost impossible! (Laughs)

Congratulations on making it…

David Zellner: THANKS ! It took us ten years. I wrote Primitives a long time ago. We made other films in the meantime. It often happens that you write screenplays, don't find the money to make them, and move on to something else. But this one has never really left our minds. We held on. Little by little, more and more people were attracted to the project. We ended up being supported by Square Peg, Ari Aster's company. Then Jesse (Eisenberg) became involved in the project, both as an actor and producer, which gave us additional legitimacy. But hey, we were never so naive as to think that it would be an easy film to sell! This is why the script had to be very precise in terms of tone. It was necessary that, when we made actors, producers or financiers read it, they would immediately understand what it was about. A film with creatures usually evokes either a horror film or a children's film. Gold, Primitives is neither. Because there's no dialogue – human dialogue – people sometimes think it's partly improvised. On the contrary: it was very precise, meticulous. And it is this meticulousness that allowed us to find the right balance between the absurd dimension of the film and its poignant nature.

You had already dedicated a short film to Sasquatch in 2010…

Nathan Zellner: Yes, Sasquatch Birth Journal 2. It started from the same idea as Primitives : If these creatures exist, then what do they do when they're not walking in the woods? So we said to ourselves: what if we showed a Bigfoot giving life? We started to phosphatize, to rave about it. How do they move? How do they communicate with each other? Many of these conversations led to comedy ideas. Then David started writing the feature film and we realized that the joke might be cut short, so we wanted to use this madness to question what separates animals from humans. We wanted it to be touching, to talk about these Sasquatch as a family, to show how they survive in the wild. It led to something more moving than just the absurd situations that initially amused us.

Why was it important to have well-known names in the credits like Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough? There are their names on the poster but if you don't know it's them, it's almost impossible to recognize them…

David Zellner: It's true. Let's say that part of this still comes down to our taste for the absurd… But if we needed real actors, it's firstly because it wasn't just a question of representing a creature in the background or to be satisfied with a physical performance. We needed actors capable of giving real emotional depth to the film. Actors as gifted in comedy as in drama. Look at Riley, those big blue eyes are so expressive, she can give you a ton of information with the most discreet flutter of her eyelashes! We didn't really realize it before we were actually making the film, but what we were doing was actually quite close to silent cinema, because we couldn't rely on dialogue to create an emotion or provide information.

The way in which director duos divide up the work is often quite mysterious. With you, at least, we know that David writes and that Nathan plays one of the Sasquatch…

Nathan Zellner: Our operation is very intuitive, difficult to explain. Ever since we were little and we shot films together, we did everything together. But when we were kids, there always had to be one in front of the camera, and the other behind…

David Zellner: I'm an actor, too. But on this film, we couldn't both act. Can you imagine the two directors covered in hair from morning to night? Impossible. So Nathan played one of the roles. It seemed natural. Look at him: he's built like a Bigfoot.

Primitives, by Nathan and David Zellner. With Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek… Coming soon to the cinema.

Champs-Elysées Film Festival, in Paris, until June 25.