Six years before the great Irish Oscar boom of 2016, Juanita Wilson, an articulate Dubliner with a background in fine art, secured a nomination in the best short film section for the astonishing The Door. A year later, her first feature, As If I Am Not There, was the Irish selection for best foreign language film. With these projects, Wilson honed a unique voice that had few obvious predecessors. Based on reportage by Svetlana Alexievich (later a Nobel Prize winner), The Door told a tale from the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. As If I Am not There, from a non-fiction book by Slavenka Drakulic, concerned the sexual abuse of women in the Bosnian war.
“Those stories impact on you in a way that’s apart from the fuss and nonsense of the film industry,” she says of the source material. “They are real human experiences that can teach you the meaning of humanity. Despite going through such difficult circumstances, you can come out with the ability to love and forgive. Your initial reaction is: I want to tell this story for them.”
On the surface, Wilson's second feature sounds like a vigorous shift away from her early efforts in mediated reportage. Based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter's Bone, Tomato Red tells the story of a drifter who falls in with a family of brash characters – Anna Friel is great as a charismatic matriarch – in a blistering corner of the United States. Woodrell's tales are inextricably bound up with the Ozarks, but Wilson found herself shooting in Canada and moving the action to the American west.
First choice
“Naivety helps you through these things initially,” she says. “You are driven by your love for the book. Our first choice would have been to set it where the story was set. But we looked into that and it just wasn’t financially viable. We looked at shooting in New Orleans. But we couldn’t get that to work as a production model. We ended up in Canada and that contributed greatly to the film. But initially that was difficult.”
Woodrell is seen as a “laureate of the Ozarks”. Moving his story could, potentially, have been akin to setting a Raymond Chandler adaptation somewhere other than Los Angeles. But these characters seem very much at home in the dusty trailer parks and wretched scrubland.
“That did put up a whole dilemma,” Wilson says. “You don’t want to move it too far because you want to keep the dialogue. But you can’t pretend you’re in the same environment. Obviously, I consulted Daniel when I became aware that the decision had almost been made for me. I sent him pictures and he was fine with it. When he came and saw what we had planned, he then understood why we were there.”
Working with a limited budget, Wilson plonked her cast in Ashcroft, British Columbia. In such situations, a family atmosphere can develop. You are a thousand miles from home. Nobody has anywhere else to go at night. A communal spirit is, surely, guaranteed.
Morale
“You can be lucky and unlucky with that,” she laughs. “There is a one-star or two-star hotel and that was the only bar in town. So everybody came there. Everybody ate the same food. Everybody played pool at night. I believe that does help morale. You have a lot of fun while making your money go as far as possible.”
There is, it seems, no way of keeping Donald Trump out of any conversation these days. The characters in Tomato Red look very much like the urban media's stereotype of the average Trump voter. These are, perhaps, the excluded and the ignored Americans who helped turn the rural bits of the US map red.
Wilson is not so sure about that.
“They are outsiders who are victims of snobbery,” she says. “In that sense I would suggest they are outside of all politics.”
She does, nonetheless, accept that the story reflects certain contemporary discontents.
“This film is very relevant to today,” she says. “It is our rage that will destroy us. I hope this film is about the need to have a voice and to be listened to. It’s about not pointing to other people and blaming them. We should look within ourselves. A random act of violence that is tragic for a person caught in the wrong place is often an accumulation of many small injustices.”
Put like that, Tomato Red sounds very like the films with which Wilson made her name. Her interest in the reasons why people hate continues to colour her work. (Explaining the result of that hatred in Tomato Red would, perhaps, involve a spoiler too far.)
Hard work
Juanita studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin and went on to work in sculpture and video art. Before directing her first film, she toiled as a producer on two notable features: Les Blair’s
H3
and Damien O’Donnell’s
Inside I’m Dancing
. That’s hard work. If such films fail to make it into cinemas the producer gets the blame. If they succeed the director gets the credit.
“I just wanted to make sure films happened,” she said.
Few debut short films are as ambitious as The Door. She travelled to Kiev and Pripyat, which became a virtual ghost town after Chernobyl, in her attempts to convey the horrors of that event. The Oscar nomination was deserved.
“I just wanted those stories to be told and heard,” she says. “I love memoir and I love how those stories make you relate to people. You learn so much if you haven’t been in those circumstances. The courage that most people require to get through a day is remarkable.”
She is returning to that form for an adaptation of Artis Henderson's memoir Unremarried Widow. That book details the author's experiences after her husband's death in the Iraq war. It sounds as if familiar Wilsonian themes will be revisited. She has not been lured to Los Angeles? Ireland will remain the base?
“I am not sure what being somewhere else would change,” she says. “It’s great to go out there. But you still have to engage with people. But it still comes down to the script . . . And who’s in it. Ha ha!”
’Twas ever thus.
