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Bethany Ashton Wolf began her career in Los Angeles as an actress but soon found herself co-writing and co-producing the controversial indie film, DON'S PLUM , starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. After that she went on to write, produce, and star in the short film, THE BURGUNDY ROOM , winning three awards at the Louisiana Video Shorts Festival in New Orleans, including "The Best of the Fest" award. Her next project was a SAG experimental called FIRST AND LAST in which she wrote, directed, produced and starred in, followed by her short film, WAIT , which was screened at the Waterfront Film Festival to a standing ovation .
LITTLE CHENIER is Bethany's directorial feature debut.
LITTLE CHENIER is a Cajun story about two brothers who have no one but each other. Living on a houseboat in the bayou, Beaux and his mentally handicapped brother Pemon try and make ends meet at their local bait shop. The two live a simple life until Pemon is accused of a crime and Beaux must protect his brother against all odds. LITTLE CHENIER becomes layered with other characters and stories as the main plot unfolds--an undying fascination with a mother the two brothers haven't seen in twenty years, an alcoholic father whose own disdain for his children is unyielding, and a bitter deputy married to Beaux's one great love.
This is a classic story about cause and effect. The story is about things unspoken. It is about what we do while we are waiting to know truth. It is about salvation, redemption, and cutting the ties that bind us, hopefully to find some sort of inner peace in the end.
Bayou waters appear still. The stillness of the bayou represents the stillness that each of the character's lives has come to. Each character can't seem to let go of their own past and move forward, and they find themselves stuck somewhere in between. And because of that, the town as a whole presents itself as an anachronism.
My brother and I grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana and both have always had an insatiable love of the bayou and its people. For years we had both wanted to make a film that embraced Cajun culture in a way that had never been presented on film before. Years earlier, my brother had written a story about two brothers, Beauxregard and Pemon, living and fishing on the bayous of Louisiana. I had a few projects under my belt and was looking for my next screenplay to write and I kept coming back to his story. So we flew home, got in an old boat we borrowed from a friend, and just motored out to all the magical places we had encountered as kids--a floating gas station, grocery store, alligator nests, clusters of houseboat villages, and the most unforgettable sunsets we had ever seen. The most memorable for us was a place our dad had taught us how to fish. The place is so small, it's not even considered a town; just one road lined with oak trees, bayou water on each side, and family houseboats tied to each bank. We knew instantly this would be our backdrop for the story and from there we began writing the screenplay.
I feel such a moral responsibility to show the world what Cajun culture is all about. So many misconceptions about the culture exist, largely because no one knows anything about it. It is a culture that cannot be studied out of a textbook. Its traditions and history have been passed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next.
Cajun people are the most generous, gracious people I've ever had the experience of knowing. They have an enormous amount of love and respect for their traditions, family and land and I wanted to honor that with this story. And while I wasn't making a documentary about the culture, I wanted to tell a deeply rich story that the culture could permeate through.
Cajun culture is rich, beautiful and alive and I wanted the setting to be as authentic as possible. It was important to me to shoot this film independently with Louisiana funding so that I knew I could create an environment sensitive to my approach. I wanted to shoot it all in the bayou. I wanted all of our extras to be Cajun, all of our musicians to be Cajun, to cast as many locals as possible, and to have true Cajun accents. No one in Hollywood would let me do that.
The look of this film began with my main character: the bayou. The natural backdrop of this film set the pace, tone, and lighting style for me. I tried to stay true to that natural state throughout the film. There was water and there was land and it was the dead heat of summer in Louisiana. Those three elements set a distinct mood and color palette for me to work from. I used as much natural light as possible. I shot with Kodak 35mm film and I concentrated on adding rich amber, violet, and magenta tones to accent the warm golds and greens in the land and water around me.
I think a lot of American films are afraid to let a scene breathe. LITTLE CHENIER is a film I felt deserved to breathe. I wanted long, fluid shots, like the movement of water. I wanted to bring the audience into this world with the most unobtrusive camera movements possible. I wanted the edit to be as subtle as possible. I wanted to film long moments of nothingness. I told my actors, "You can never wait too long. Do nothing. Say nothing. The longer the better for me."
For my post production, I chose to stay away from a DI and digital opticals. I wanted a rich, traditionally-made print.
My influences have mostly been foreign films. Italian directors, Guiseppe Tornatore and Bernardo Bertolucci, Spanish directors, Alfonso Arau and Alejandro Gabriel Innaritu, are some of my favorite filmmakers. Even though my film was story driven, I did not want the words in the story to dominate. Like a foreign film, I wanted the picture and sound to convey the feelings and emotions of each character. The slow movement of someone's hand across a weathering photograph, the glance of a woman's love through a sea of dancers, the fluttering of a frightened bird's wings at the sound of a gunshot , these are the elements I wanted to tell the story. With that, the words would hopefully become meaningful and true.
Of American influences, for this particular script, I referenced Sean Penn's The Pledge as an example of similar pacing and Todd Field's In the Bedroom as an example of similar tone. I love the work of French cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, especially in the film The Human Stain , and I made many light and color references to that film with my DP and Production Designer during pre-production. And before starting any project, I sit down and watch Searching for Bobby Fischer and Out of Africa. They are two of my favorite films and they just make me want to be a better filmmaker.
Outside of films, I just start looking at everything I come into contact with in my life and try to take in as many sensory experiences as possible during pre-production. I rip pictures out of magazines, reference all sorts of art and photographs from library books, I collect rocks and pieces of textured rubble--anything that has an aesthetic impact on me. I have stacks of old National Geographics that I love to use. And I like photographing my locations from different angles at different times of the day long before storyboarding to give me inspiration.
Memorable, hmmm...I think the most memorable has to be the fact that everyone told us we would never be able to make this film on the budget we had. We were attempting to shoot a film that took place primarily on water. We only had 28 days to shoot and many times there was no land base for miles. There was a 110 degree heat, and we were in tiny john boats surrounded by alligators, snakes and swarming mosquitoes. And to achieve this magical town we had created in the script, I had to film in 35 locations spread out over 100 miles of bayous and swamps throughout the state, most of them only reachable by boat. Because of our short shooting schedule, we had up to two company moves a day. On water days, we would have the actors in a boat, camera crew in a boat, sound and makeup in a boat, and the only way to reach each other was by motoring up. Simple tasks that no one usually thinks twice about, like handing an actor a piece of wardrobe, would become a gigantic procedure. It would often eat hours in our shooting day.
The most difficult part was strategizing how to move film equipment, cast and crew by boats to each water location. We would move up to twenty boats a day, including houseboats. Crew members crumbled away as the shoot went on. By the end, it felt as though we had experienced our own Apocalypse Now. We suffered from sunstroke, heatstroke, motion sickness, and sleep deprivation. We were all skinny and covered in insect bites. We had war wounds. And, standing there at the end, there was an unwavering sense of pride in what we had accomplished together. I must add that through it all we were safe and organized. When you don't have money, you must plan and strategize, plan and strategize. Those two things are free and it's a beautiful thing.
Oh yeah, and I'll add something funny. We were shooting a script that called for a drought, yet hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico kept stirring up continual rainstorms. I really wanted to preserve the element of the drought in our script if at all possible, so when it would rain, we would shut down, wait for it to pass, then mop up the road, houseboat, or wherever we were, with hundreds of towels and then continue with lines, such as "I sure wish it would rain is all...". Funny, right?
Absolutely. What started out as a cinematic responsibility to Cajun culture now has become a moral obligation for me, as well as my family. Hurricane Rita hit all the bayou communities we had filmed in just 31 days after we wrapped principal photography, wiping most of them out completely. It hit the very land and the very homes that were so graciously given to us during filming by these amazing Cajun communities. The community, known as Little Chenier, is gone . Here I had set out to make a film that embraced a culture that thrived on the love of family and the importance of land, and now that land has been lost and those families have been separated. This film represents their hearts and their homes and is the only footage they have of the life they once had on the bayou. So when I look at this film, I see their faces, their love, and their pride for who they are. For them, it is a piece of living history and for me it is a platform in which to share their stories and hopefully make people aware of their devastation and need of help. |
