Paul Dano on his directorial debut Wildlife

Long one of American indie cinema's most interesting actors, Paul Dano breaks out as a director with his compelling debut feature Wildlife, a deeply compassionate study of a fractured family at the dawn of the 60s

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 27 Oct 2018

Just because actors spend many an idle hour on movie sets, it doesn’t necessarily mean they pick up the skills of where to place a camera or how to compose a shot. No one would confuse the workmanlike films of George Clooney, Angelina Jolie or Ben Affleck – to name three stars who’ve used their Hollywood muscle to move into the director’s chair – as great works of cinema, but some actors do seem to learn a trick or two from their time on set. One example appears to be Paul Dano, who hardly puts a foot wrong in his evocative directorial debut Wildlife, a deliciously melancholic family drama set at the dawn of the 60s.

Since his breakout role in 2001, aged 15, in the troubling L.I.E., Dano has work with many master filmmakers from whom he’d have been wise to take inspiration. Try compiling a list of the finest directors working today, and odds are Dano has a connection to most of them. Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood), Kelly Reichardt (Meek’s Cutoff), Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners), Bong Joon-ho (Okja) and Richard Linklater (Fast Food Nation) are just a few of the auteurs for whom he’s acted.

When we meet Dano in a Soho hotel ahead of Wildlife’s premiere at the London Film Festival, he’s quick to point out that he was too busy on those sets to pick the brains of those filmmakers directly. “Usually, if it’s a good part in something, you're pretty much a horse with blinders on, you know, there for that character.” This isn’t to say he didn’t learn anything from the likes of Anderson and Reichardt. “But you certainly pick up stuff through osmosis for sure,” says the 34-year-old New Yorker. “What I do notice is that a lot of the great filmmakers, when you step on their sets, there's just sort of a temperature that people are working at, and as an actor, knowing that feeling when the crew is totally engaged in the film is wonderful.”


Carey Mulligan, Ed Oxenbould and Jake Gyllenhaal in Wildlife

The incisive Wildlife suggests he got the temperature on his own set just right. Based on Richard Ford’s novel of the same name, it centres on the Brinsons, a family of three who’ve recently moved to a sleepy town in Montana. There’s stay-at-home mother Jeanette (Carey Mulligan), her feckless husband Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) and their watchful 14-year-old Joe (Ed Oxenbould), through whose eyes Dano shoots this fracturing of a family.

Dano says that he thought that if he ever made a film, it would be about the family unit. “That was my hunch,” he says. “First of all, I'm very close with my own family. When I was young in Manhattan, we were all in a one-bedroom apartment, my sister and I were in bunk beds and my mom and dad in a bed next to us. So we're close – too close! – and it's always just been something that has spoken to me, whether it’s in an Ozu movie or a Eugene O'Neill play or whatever. It feels like a good place to start [as a filmmaker], probably because it's also a place where you can be personal and universal.”

The team of collaborators on Wildlife is similarly tight-knit. First there’s Zoe Kazan, Dano’s partner, who co-wrote the script. “Initially I actually thought about just hiring a writer, but once I thought of the ending and the final image, I thought, 'Well, I think I can write this', in a sort of a low stakes, experimental way. But then it turned out I started to kind of get into it and think, ‘OK, yeah, this will work, I can write this!'”

His bubble burst slightly when he passed his effort to Kazan, who wrote the inventive romantic fantasy Ruby Sparks in 2012, in which she and Dano both starred. “I gave it to Zoe and she kind of just tore it apart,” he recalls. “And so I was like, ‘fuck, OK.’” Dano says he took her criticism on the chin: “I mean, I was lucky. She said, ‘Why don't you let me do a pass because I see what you're trying to do?’ And I was like, ‘Great!’ She's a proper writer, and I probably wrote more for the image and sort of the emotional guts of the film, and she helped bring a really great sense of structure and I'm just kind of grateful she helped me pull it together.”

Dano is similarly close to his cast. “I've known Carey for a long time,” he explains. “Her and Zoe did a play together about a decade ago, shared a dressing room, and we’ve been friends ever since. And I’ve always just thought, ‘I would love to see her get the chance to be more messy’. Carey's so composed in life and in her film roles, and I just wanted to know what that other part of her is like, you know, that really messy part of her. And luckily she felt the same way.” As for Gyllenhaal, Dano appeared with him in Bong Joon-ho’s wild fantasy Okja, but their friendship goes back much further. “We all knew each other and I knew Jake and Carey wanted to work together, plus the idea of seeing Jake do something that was really classically American felt good to me, and luckily he responded to the character and the family in the sense of this guy who’s having a crisis of masculinity.”

Wildlife is set in 1960 and Ford wrote the novel in 1990, but it’s particularly interesting to view the story through the lens of 2018. Early on, Jerry, a golf pro at a local course, is given his marching orders for repeatedly gambling with his customers, and this sends him into such a tailspin of self-pity that he abandons his family indefinitely to go off and fight a forest fire that’s heading to town. But the flame his departure sparks in Jeanette, who up until this moment has been wearing the mask of meek housewife, is just as ferocious.

In one respect, the film is about a woman seizing a life of her own after putting up with her husband’s bullshit for far too long. “Jeanette is such a fascinating character. I think that [feminist aspect] is certainly part of Zoe. She's really smart and she has a real voice, you know, and I learned a lot from her while writing this.”

Dano describes being bowled over by the book when he first picked it up. “The first paragraph remains one of my favorite book openings ever. So immediately I was like, 'OK, I gotta read this'. I was drunk on the book. I ended up reading it many times and daydreamed about it.” You can feel this intoxication in the movie too. In some ways, it’s a mystery film, as the 14-year-old protagonist tries to understand his parents. “I was fascinated by the idea of being thrust into adulthood via your parents,” says Dano, “learning they have a past life, suddenly learning they have struggles.” Wildlife, then, is that most archetypal of American movies: the coming-of-age film. But there’s a twist. “For me, the film ultimately is a coming-of-age of not just the kid, but a mother, a father and a son. It’s a coming-of-age of a family.”

Both parents make reckless, selfish decisions. In the film’s most excruciating scene, Jeanette takes Joe along with her to have dinner with a much older man she’s trying to seduce, the boy paralysed with horror when his mother’s intentions become abundantly clear. “Oh, that scene is deliciously horrible,” is how Dano describes it. What marks Wildlife apart from other tales of the crumbling American family, though – say Sam Mendes’ American Beauty or Noah Baumbach’s Squid and the Whale or George Clooney’s recent Suburbicon – is that Wildlife brims over with compassion in spite of its characters’ flaws. “It wasn't about condemning anybody, it’s more like presenting a sort of warts-and-all honesty of people losing their way or a marriage breaking, not judging it. The film is harsh in some ways, but I also wanted there to be love too.”


Wildlife is released 9 Nov by Icon