In the middle of last year, I travelled from Australia to the Western Highlands in Scotland, right to the edge of the Inner Hebrides archipelago, to work on the production of Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s fourth feature film Harvest, her first in the English language. I was to be the director’s assistant as well as the assistant editor. I had admired Athina’s work since seeing Attenberg (2010) at the Sydney Film Festival as a student, and got to know her a little through taking part in Oxbelly Labs (a script development lab Athina helped found) with my second feature script Petrol

Harvest was adapted by Athina and the producer Joslyn Barnes from a novel of the same name by the English novelist Jim Crace. Athina spoke of the film as a western, set in no particular time or place, where a village living by an old-world order is destroyed over a course of a week, descending into chaos and despair akin to a Brueghel painting. The word ‘chaos’ became a kind of clue to comprehending the ethereal and porous world of Harvest (‘haos‘ in Greek, which is the name of Athina’s production company). Chaos was sacred, a notion to be respected and nourished, one of the principles, at least to my imagination, of the production that unfolded – full of life, risk and trust, at the mercy of the weather. 

Harvest, credit: Jaclyn Martinez, Harvest Film Ltd.

There was, from Athina and producer Rebecca O’Brien, an extraordinary dedication to the experience of the film, not only the film itself. On location scouts we paid attention to oaks, rowan trees, sycamores, beeches, burdock, nettles, thistles. The delight in the beauty of the natural landscape, the richness of colours shifting with the seasons, the intricacies of light and how all this interacted with the faces of the actors – professional ensemble cast as well as the locals that played the villagers – inspired, perhaps, the choice to shoot the film on celluloid. Barley, rye and flax were planted to be harvested on film; local farmers taught actors to reap and plough; crafts people shared their understanding of spinning and weaving.

A year later I met Athina at the New York Film Festival after Harvest’s New York premiere, having seen the final cut of the film for the first time. What follows is a discussion that came out of a shared experience of the shoot, but was at the same time an opportunity for me to ask Athina questions I might not have had a chance to ask in the process. 

– A.L.

Harvest, by the English novelist Jim Crace, was originally brought to you by producers Joslyn Barnes, Rebecca O’ Brien and Michael Weber. Do you remember the first impressions and feelings when reading it, if there was something from that first encounter that carried you through the project?

Joslyn had written a first draft of the adaptation. Reading the script and the novel in tandem felt like the beginning of a somnambulant walk. I read both very slowly. Jim Crace’s use of language is at the same time surgical and intangible – I felt like I was not going to do it justice unless I comprehended the exact use and layering of each word. His world has no specific place, no specific time, the language itself is trance-inducing. If you start asking too specific questions, the text resists. To be able to work on the screenplay with Joslyn, I had to, first of all, fully surrender to this resistance. It was like a rite of passage, but you had no idea where you were going to arrive. This rhythm of reading and this rhythm of entering this world was essential in understanding the central character, Walt, who is a weak man. How do you spend an entire film disliking the protagonist, yet sympathising with him? I felt it was in the rhythm. Slow, quiet, mundane, frustrating even – and then suddenly, a burst of action, a flash of recognition. And then back to sleepwalking. 

Harvest, credit: Jaclyn Martinez, Harvest Film Ltd.

My films don’t follow strict arcs or beats, and Joslyn and I were very much in synchronicity, in that respect. We knew that this was going to be a film about people who do nothing. We were not going to change that. It is the main thing that attracted me to Jim’s novel.

What is the film’s relationship to history? How did you choose to relate to history as the writer and the director?

I didn’t see it as a historical film, or a so-called period film. Because not much has changed since. Joslyn and I approached the script as a modern story – it is happening today and everywhere. We are trapped in this eternal cycle of loss and exile. We are condemned or condemning ourselves to be inert witnesses to history.

What do you mean by witnesses?

Walt, and his fellow villagers… There’s something innocent about them, a sense of naïveté and callous complicity at the same time. I mean, look at what’s happening right now, around us. The world is literally falling apart, and we are consuming it as data. We are consuming history as it’s unfolding, we’re part of it, and at the same time its compulsive voyeurs. Walt is proud of his newfound relationship with the land, his sense of belonging. And when he is suddenly expelled from it, he can’t really do anything about it, he is paralysed.

It’s the beginning of the end of the heroic involvement with history. 

If the film is asking us as audience members to identify with the villagers, that’s putting us in a quite an uncomfortable state because there is perhaps a kind of dissonance in how we are, and how we’d like to see ourselves, or how we’ve gotten used to seeing ourselves. And the film is trying to mirror how we are, which is a kind of harsh reality.

There are no good or bad characters in the film. They’re both. The novel itself is a sort of oxidised looking glass reflecting this duality, making it difficult to empathise. Like a Brechtian play, it defies empathy. 

Harvest, credit: Jaclyn Martinez, Harvest Film Ltd.

Is this something you spoke to Caleb Landry Jones about, in building his character? Walt has so many layers – he’s the holy fool, a man with no qualities. He’s also an intellectual, a medicine man. He’s a man of many hats. How did you work with Caleb?

Caleb is feral in how he approaches his characters. He doesn’t like to talk very much about his character. Once he takes the role – he does the work. This suited me perfectly as I don’t like to talk much about characters either. Although everything about Walt was so much against Caleb’s own personality and disposition. Caleb is a man of action. A lot of the work was fighting his urge to save the day, to be a hero. This created a feisty dynamic between us, and an interesting dynamic within his character. We lived in the same digs, we had meals together, we walked, saying nothing, sensing each other’s energy – and then we rehearsed. The script was a roadmap. Everything in the end was in the fissures, the crevices that created Caleb’s Walt, patiently recalibrating his gestures.

Were you surprised, especially with Caleb, with what he did?

I was always surprised by Caleb.

He never did the same thing!

Right. He never did the same thing. We never did the same thing. I did not have a predetermined idea of what a scene was going to be. I wanted to let it develop freely amongst the cast. What did you see when you watched the rushes during the assembly edit? You knew the script, and you also knew the way we had worked in rehearsals.  

I was very surprised actually. I was moved by the freedom that you allowed your actors. You let them surprise you, and surprise Matt (Johnson) and Nico (Leunen), your editors. I wanted to talk about the role of chance and chaos. We’ve talked a lot about the sacred idea of chaos, your production company is called Haos. Was Harvest different from your three previous films in how much you invited Chance and Chaos as creative forces? And what was the role of improvisation, in working with the actors and with the camera? I think you and the cinematographer Sean Price Williams created a visual language that was in a way a departure to what either of you had done before.

I don’t want to call it improvisation. We had a code, a strict code. With the cast, with Sean, with Nathan (Parker) our production designer, with Kirsty (Halliday) our costume designer. But part of the code was that we were going to embrace anarchy. We were not improvising action on set, but there was a sense of improvisation in the way we recorded what was going on, instead of shooting it. Sean is a great cinématographe or camera-dancer, as you know. There was an intent by all of us to live inside it, instead of standing across from it, to approach it as one living organism. There was little separation between state and church, crew and cast.

In the morning, I would describe what we were going to do during the day to all the non-actor villagers who did not have the script, so they were really responding to what was unfolding before their eyes. Full immersion. We got into a sort of communal trance. Because we had very little time, because nature was so alive and we couldn’t tame her and we didn’t want to. The most important thing was that we were there.

Harvest, credit: Jaclyn Martinez, Harvest Film Ltd.

You set up the old world and then you destroyed it.

Yes. It was a process of stripping knowledge, awareness – to get back to a prelapsarian moment.

Did you see the novel and the film as pessimistic or nihilistic? I personally don’t see the film entirely that way. There is a kind of melancholy in it, but I don’t think the film is ultimately a nihilistic film.

It isn’t?

Despite the hopelessness or the helplessness of the characters, the film doesn’t have a dreary tone. It’s like the tone overrides the plot. There’s a kind of subliminal space that I think the film opens up through images and through something indescribable.

The film doesn’t take a thesis on morality. It’s just looking at the situation of a community being taken apart. There is a certain tenderness towards everyone, even toward (the villain) Master Jordan. He’s just a young man who wishes to engineer a better future. At the same time, I think maybe you have this optimistic sense of the film because there was a whole community that came together to make a film about a community being dismantled. There’s an oxymoron in the way we made the film and what the film is ultimately about. Shooting can be alienating. You bring all these people together in places that are artificial zones of hard labour, like temporary camps of film workers who get together to re-enact a fantasy. And that’s something I didn’t want to do this time. Living and working on the land was the only way to experience a shared sense of belonging.

We started talking about history and, the film takes a very playful, punk, I think, approach to history. I’m curious about the influence of Scotland. The novel is set in England, and you were inspired by the location scouts to film it in Scotland. Scotland really entered the film in a very real way. Not only the locations themselves and the colours and the quality of light, it was also about working with the community and processing the stories that you found in the community, as well as casting people from the area.

My first instinct was for the film not to take place in the lush English countryside. There’s something hardened about that landscape in Western Scotland. Also, as a Greek, I felt an immediate kinship with the landscape and people in Argyllshire. Our producer Rebecca (O’ Brien) is Scottish. She was an invaluable guide to me. It was also about having a 360-degree panorama on location. I wanted to shoot this film like a live medieval drama – shooting the entire scene without stopping, and being able to shoot in all directions. I didn’t want to VFX the hell out of everything, and neither could we afford to.

Harvest, credit: Jaclyn Martinez, Harvest Film Ltd.

Every time I make a film there’s a very close relationship to space. Space may be the most important character in my films. I don’t think Harvest could have been made without communing with the land. This land had not been cultivated since the time when the novel roughly takes place, whether during the Enclosure Act, or the Scottish Clearances. There was a ritualistic gesture in searching for and finding the barley and flax heirloom seeds, sowing them and then harvesting. We learned from and worked with the people who live in the region, whose ancestors had been kicked out of that land. This cycle was as important as the story of the film itself.

It’s a film about expulsion and exploitation, but it’s also about how communities adapt…

…or don’t adapt, and they get decimated because they don’t or can’t resist. The villagers don’t rescue the captured women, they don’t organise to defend their land. They are forced to flee.

And yet the women were given a fair bit more agency and strength, I think, in the film than in the novel. The women enjoy liberation in the end, on their horse.

Yes, that’s something that Joslyn and I thought was important, that the women were not victimised. Theirs is a rudimentary resistance, but at least they’re defending themselves and each other. Mistress Beldam, the scapegoat outsider, in the end becomes the most catalytic character.

You worked with Caleb, Ian Hassett, Lexx and the film’s sound designer Nicolas Becker on the score. How did this collaboration come about? And what is the relationship between the music and the sound design? Again, the role of place is important here.

There was an immersive element to our process. I was trying to figure out what the score would be and I was talking to Caleb and Ian while in L.A. We were at Caleb’s house, which is where his studio is, there are instruments everywhere. Caleb got on the drums and Ian got on keyboards and they just started playing. The music immediately felt right.

Harvest, credit: Jaclyn Martinez, Harvest Film Ltd.

Nicolas (Becker) was already working on the sound design as if it was a score. That was something that we discussed from the very beginning. It was like a symphony that nature was performing. He had come to location and had set up his 360° mics, had used his contact mics to record the ground itself, the bugs and the birds. It was becoming a music score unto itself. And we talked about mixing that with electronic sound, like the sound that comes from the future, the echo of the future that is beckoning this world. Then we got together in London in the recording studio together with Lexx, our score producer. The Harvest Family Band was born. We spent three days playing live to scenes. That was truly improvisational. I ended up conducting, which I had never done before. They would play through a whole scene, then change their instruments and do it again. Perhaps five different keyboards, different percussions. Nicolas had brought all sorts of handmade instruments. Lexx was mixing it all live. A few weeks later we invited Laura Cannell, a fantastic fiddle player, to play along to the edited tracks. There was not the usual separation between the composing of the score and its post-production. It was such a beautiful gift for me as a director to be able to be part of that. I don’t think that happens very often.

Was there a certain code you had with Nathan Parker and Kirsty Halliday in working on the production design and the costumes?

Again, it was about not being specific about the time and space. The red roofs were already there on the existing barn steadings at Inverlonan, offered to us by their owner Lupi Moll, and we didn’t want to change that. Although they may seem quite contemporary, we found out that those red iron roofs were introduced centuries ago. We didn’t want to do anything too folky. Nathan designed and built this skinny, tall, black barn, and to me it felt like a metaphor, it made me think of New York’s tenement buildings where immigrants from the “old countries” ended up.

Harvest, credit: Jaclyn Martinez, Harvest Film Ltd.

And with the costumes, we had the idea of the wrap, a universal dress for peasants all over the world. Each villager could make it their own by the way it was folded around their body. Kirsty and her team made all these great accessories by hand. The fabrics were dyed by hand with local plant dyes. They used wool, cotton and linen from Scotland. The process of dressing included laying each actor on the floor and wrapping them, like babies. There was something ritualistic to it. It was a uniform, but at the same time it was individualised. You couldn’t tell exactly when or where it was from. Everything was suspended in time and place, and the only thing that was eternal was nature.

Sometime ago in our conversations back at the Oxbelly Lab, you mentioned the book The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom as a text that was at one time formative to you. Bloom’s thesis has to do with misreadings, how poets misread their precursors and how misreading and what he calls ‘poetic misprision’ become necessary to their survival as poets. I was trying to understand what it was about this text that moved you and I thought about how in all your films, you have a very considered play with structures and genres and traditions, tropes and archetypes. There are elements of western and screwball and horror and noir and comedy and other genres through all your films. But at the same time, I don’t see you as a genre filmmaker, and Harvest is not strictly a genre film. How did you use and/or rebel against genre?

You don’t see it as a genre film?

Well, maybe this is a question. Do you think it’s a genre film? There’s a kind of ‘western’ backbone, but it’s not a Western in a strict sense. And it’s not a horror film.

What is a Western?

That’s the question! I can’t say I have a very firm grasp on genres.

I guess you can say that I’m constantly misinterpreting genres. I mean, a classic Western revolves around a tight community in a far west town, trying to make it through hardship. There’s a hero, with a moral calibre. And then there is a villain who arrives and is somehow trying to spoil, to disrupt the community. And usually, the hero resists and saves the community.

And the hero is a little bit ahead of the community. They often know more than the others.

Exactly, but in this case, the hero knows less than everyone. And, he’s not able to bring himself or the community to redemption. So, it is a Western without redemption and without catharsis. Does that make it a non-Western? Perhaps.

Harvest, credit: Jaclyn Martinez, Harvest Film Ltd.

The influence was very much the revisionist Westerns of the ‘70s. I devour movies, watching cinema is a big part of my life. But then this thing happens, it’s very rare for me to remember the plot after a while, or the specific characters or the name of the characters. But there’s something that remains, and I think that’s why Bloom’s book was important to me. Something remains that is like a misremembering. My own, anxious, distorting memory of the films that have formed my canon of influence. But somehow the story is never important. It’s something else, a mysterious essence, that remains.

Harvest, credit: Jaclyn Martinez, Harvest Film Ltd.

I think for all of us, we don’t really know why we react or respond to certain films and not to others. A film can have a crystal-clear construction, with beginning, middle and end, but it doesn’t really talk to us. You might recognise, appreciate the perfection of its structure or story, but there is something that is dead about it. I respond more to films that resist tidy meaning. That’s why it’s so difficult for me to talk about my films, what they’re about. I dread this question, and I dread my answers even more. Because the films that I love, they’re about so many things at the same time. I guess that’s why it takes me so long to make a movie. I’m fighting against “content”. For better or for worse.

Here is a quote from The Anxiety of Influence: “For why do men write poems? To rally everything that remains and not to sanctify, nor propound.” I was very moved by it and I thought of Harvest. I want to ask – what, in your opinion, is the future of cinema as art? And how do we keep working in this field as artists in this time? What remains, what can we rally that remains?

I will respond to your unanswerable question by quoting the Situationists: 

“On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time.”

About The Author

Alena Lodkina is a Russian-born Australian filmmaker. She wrote and directed the feature films Strange Colours (2017) and Petrol (2022) that have shown at festivals including Venice, Locarno, New Directors/ New Films, MIFF and Sydney Film Festival, and had a cinematic release in Australia. Alena’s fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in Heat, The Stringing Fly, Senses of Cinema, 4:3 Journal, Meanjin and Fireflies.

Related Posts