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“Me and My Friends and a Bunch of Romanians”: Isaiah Saxon on The Legend of Ochi
The Legend of Ochi Back in 2008, Isaiah Saxon and his collaborators—Daren Rabinovitch and Sean Hellfritsch—appeared on Filmmaker’s annual 25 New Faces of Film list based on the strength of their impressive work on indie rock music videos. Saxon himself had a direct hand in helming iconic filmic accompaniments for Björk’s “Wanderlust,” Grizzly Bear’s “Knife” and Panda Bear’s “Boys Latin.” All three narratives hinge on an intensely surreal collision of human and natural forces—utilizing puppetry, animation, stop-motion and special effects—endearingly lo-fi yet intensely meticulous in its execution.
The same can be said of The Legend of Ochi, Saxon’s feature debut. Produced by A24 after receiving seed money from The Russo Brothers’ AGBO production studio, the film weaves an intricate tale about a mystical primate species on the fictional Eastern European island of Carpathia. Amid a rapidly evolving technological culture and generations of fear-mongering against the Ochi—a ginger-hued, blue-skinned, would-be cousin of the real-life Golden snub-nosed monkey—a capricious young girl named Yuri (Helena Zengel) is conscripted into her eccentric father’s (Willem Dafoe) legion of ragtag hunters (among them Finn Wolfhard’s near-mute Petro) who embark on quests to cull the local Ochi population in the dead of night.
Feeling abandoned by her mother’s (Emily Watson) absence and father’s blatant preference for his warrior “sons,” Yuri finds unexpected solace in the sudden company of an infant Ochi that she finds ensnared in one of her father’s bear traps during an evening scout. She tends to the creature and decides to set out on a quest to deliver him back to his mother, defying the intra-species blood feud her father has attempted to indoctrinate her into. The wilderness they traverse into has clearly been lovingly crafted by Saxon, who supplied upward of 200 matte paintings for exterior scenes and worked intensely with John Nolan Studios in London to craft a tangible primate on a shoestring $1 million creature budget.
Saxon and I sat down for a chat at the A24 office in Manhattan, surrounded by pine-colored shelves adorned with art books and various studio ephemera. Our conversation spans the film’s extensive gestation period, the extensive world building Saxon undertook and his collaboration with friend and longtime collaborator David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors.
Filmmaker: It’s been 17 years since Filmmaker featured Encyclopedia Pictura on the annual 25 New Faces of Film list based. In that interview, you teased the fact that you were beginning to develop a feature. Was the kernel of Ochi already germinating?
Saxon: At the time I was starting to think about this movie that we called DIY. It was about a gang of kids that rebuilt their town after a natural disaster just with duct tape and hammers. That film never got made, but it turned into a bunch of other things— DIY.org being one of them, a Cartoon Network pilot being another. I spent a good decade just writing movies that were unmakeable, because my goal was to reach kids and kids are behind a giant corporate wall because it takes a lot of money to market to them. What that means is over the years, studios need sure things: big IP with high existing awareness and to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. None of that is a formula for a first-time weird filmmaker to make a movie. Against this backdrop, I just kept writing scripts that were too expensive for where I was at in my career. A24 wasn’t around, Neon wasn’t around, these companies sprouted up over the years. By the time I wrote Ochi, I was like, “This is my ‘I’ll make it by hook or by crook movie,’ one that nobody could say no to.” It still took me three and a half years of full-time work before I was greenlit on it. And it did come out of the same feelings I had way back then, which are that I feel like the magic and mystery of nature is something I want to set forth out into, get lost in and explore.
Filmmaker: When did it crystalize for you that it was time to make this venture as sole writer-director when you came from this collective artmaking background?
Saxon: I think part of the exhaustion of that is, “Oh, we’re actually all not living in the same city right now,” and things like that. I knew I was going to need to start growing some seeds in my greenhouse that I’m only watering, practically. I just started writing Ochi on my own that way. Sean and Daren have each been writing their own films that they’re trying to get made—and should be made—as well.
Filmmaker: You said it took you three and a half years to write this project and get greenlit, and I’m curious about how it was realized after that. How did you approach casting? Were these actors people who you knew you wanted to collaborate with, or was it more serendipitous than that?
Saxon: In those years of development, it became clear to me who needed to play these people. The versions of Willem Dafoe and Emily that I can conjure in my head helped me write their characters, based on their essence and their superpowers. Only Willem can be terrifying and then adorable in the same sentence of dialogue. With that voice in your head, you’re writing to that. In some ways it’s a leap of faith. I’m painting myself into a corner; if he doesn’t wanna do it, nobody else can. It wasn’t really until we were a go at A24 that I had this watertight package of concept art, creature prototype test videos, location scouting footage from Romania and a script that had been written and rewritten and boiled down to its essence, because I had to cut 34 pages to make it financeable. Then that package goes out all at once to Willem, and he says “yes” in 48 hours and then we’re greenlit. Then Emily says yes and then Helena Zengel, who I had seen in this German film called System Crasher playing this kind of disaffected little girl. Instead of looking at a thousand kids the way that you often do for a movie like this where a young actor is gonna carry the film, we just offered her the movie. So casting was unexpectedly the easiest part of this whole journey. It happened in a week. The one bit of education I got through the process was that actually getting a green light was cast-dependent. Nobody will tell you that, really. You’ll get all the studios and production companies being like, “We love this, we believe in this, you just need to do this little thing and then we’ll try to cast it,” or whatever. Really, the moment that cast says “yes,” you’re on a plane. So that’s what I learned.
Filmmaker: How did the Russo Brothers come to board as executive producers? Was Finn Wolfhard’s casting also a product of their involvement?
Saxon: No. I came to the Russo brothers because my friends, the Daniels, had just gotten development money from them for Everything Everywhere All at Once. I took this movie out to a lot of people and everyone loved it, but not a lot of people have money to spend on development. The Russos had just done End Game and they were just flush with cash. When I saw they were taking a bet on some of the most bold, weird voices—and my friends—I was like, “Well, how bad could it be?” They believed in what I was doing. So the first round of funding for the film came from them and that gave me money to then build prototypes of the creatures with John Nolan Studios in London, and also to travel to Romania with my producers to scout all these locations. All that development ended up being pivotal to later getting A24 involved. The Russo’s dropped off the project, and the option ran out before I ever got a greenlit. AGBO was critical to getting that first seed money in, then by the time we were making the film, we had no adult supervision, and it was absolutely wonderful. Even A24 didn’t have any notes on the script. It was just me and my friends and a bunch of Romanians.
Filmmaker: To that point of scouting in Romania, I know that there are some really good film tax incentives there, but I got my hands on this accompanying field guide to the film, modeled to look like a nature magazine of sorts, entitled “In Search of the Ochi.” I really enjoy the world that was built even outside of the parameters of the film itself. How did you balance research and mythmaking on this front?
Saxon: It was an organic process where I knew I wanted to tell a story about a girl and her relationship to an animal. I realized that animal should be a kind of believable, undiscovered primate species. In order to believe that it’s undiscovered, they need to be in a mythical, mysterious world, but grounded one. Where is that in the world? It’s not in the Alps, it’s not in the Rockies, it’s not in the Sierra Nevada. You go as far East as you can in the Western world to find that. That’s in the Carpathian mountain belt in Romania and Western Ukraine. This is a place that’s like a time machine. You go out of the cities and you’re immediately surrounded by horse-drawn carriages and people scything their fields by hand, building haystacks. There are the highest populations of lynx, wolves, bears and uncut primeval forest. It’s a deeply mythical place. Once I was sure that this was the world [of Ochi], I transposed that into a collage of an island that just freed me up and gave me license to be creative. I didn’t have the pressure of having some cultural authority telling the story of Romania. It really was just trying to capture what I was seeing and hearing and feeling when I was in the Carpathian Mountains. That’s where the world building starts and ends; it’s already there. I’m only adding one little germ to it, which is that there’s an undiscovered primate there. Of course, it’s a fantasy adventure movie, but I wanted for you to smell it, to feel it, for it to be dirty and grounded and feel like a real place.
Part of that is hoping that kids can just maybe be like, “Is this a real animal that I just didn’t see the nature special on? Is this an island I just haven’t learned about in geography class?” All those details add up to hopefully give you that feeling.
Filmmaker: I want to pivot to the musical components of the film. Tell me about working with Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth on the score. This is your feature directorial debut as well as his debut film score. What brought about your collaboration and what was the process like?
Saxon: When the movie was just a twinkle in my eye was right around the time Dave and I became friends. We were just mutual fans and I brought him on as the first collaborator for the project. At the time I just knew I wanted this kind of diegetic musical in which people are producing music on camera in really integrated, grounded ways. This was even more so in earlier drafts: there was a girl who wanted to become a pop star and a lot of other music in the film. It’s still in there, you know. We have Willem Dafoe singing in the movie and Emily Watson playing the flute in the movie and then, of course, humans and animals singing together. So that was exciting to him. We corresponded for years and became close friends as I was trying to make the movie and develop it. He would read the script over and over. By the time we were greenlit, there was a lot of that on-camera music. So he had to start writing and figuring out our theme before shooting. How were we gonna perform this flute on camera if he hadn’t figured it all out? As soon as we were done filming, he just stayed focused on the movie and started generating an enormous amount of material, motifs and compositions that were based on his reading of the screenplay before he’d even seen a rough cut. The idea for us was if you generate enough material, then you won’t have to respond to a temp score, which is every composer’s nightmare, for the director to get married to it. He was able to generate these MIDI sketches that I could then edit to. And there was still some temp I was married to from way back—Messiaen and Penderecki and Johnny Greenwood. There was still some of that stuff, but pretty much past the intro we were walking out into the wilderness and using his music.
I’d actually read about PTA [Paul Thomas Anderson] and Jonny Greenwood and how they worked. It’s not like PTA gives him a scene and Jonny Greenwood would score the scene and send him back the score. It’s that Jonny’s giving little sketches and then through manipulating those sketches, cutting them up, slowing them down, putting them to the edit and sending them back. Then there’s another pass at the music and it goes back and forth organically. The picture’s informed by the music and the music is informed by the director and the director is sort of in the band with the composer. So we worked that way. At some point, Dave was like, “You’re breaking my music. I need to supervise you.” Then we would spend long sessions on a Zoom where I would, with his supervision, be like, “Can we slow this bit down? Can we remove that instrument from the stem?” Once we’d done that whole process, he could then really finalize the compositions, and commit it all to a written score. Then we had a full symphonic orchestra. We had the Romanian pan flute master for all of our themes and an incredible number of people in the LA music community coming out for small sessions of harp, choir and whistling. This score took years just like the movie did. It was a tremendous contribution to the movie. I always felt like the movie in some ways is like a fantasia. It’s the power of music and pictures together. This was gonna be a grand overscore. Only a few times do we have a dialogue scene with music under it that’s maybe giving you a cue to the feelings. But usually it’s a lot of just people walking around, thinking and making choices. The music and the pictures are doing a lot of the labor.
Filmmaker: I wasn’t surprised that the movie felt very intricately crafted alongside the images. But I didn’t really think about this until you were explaining all of this: are you a musician yourself?
Saxon: No, and I think the pain of not having musical talent has driven me to become a filmmaker. I drew as a kid nonstop and that was my talent. I applied to art school as an illustrator, and I got there and all the interesting people were in the film department. I had been wondering, “Could I do that? Would I ever be able to do that?” Music is what kicked me over the edge. I was realizing that I cannot go through life not working with music. Film allowed me to nestle up against music. Here I was, years later, getting to recruit myself to be in the band with my favorite band. In some way, I know just enough to be a nuisance and to break things [laughs].
I’m married to my favorite composer, Meara O’Reilly. Her album, Hockets for Two Voices, was being written at the same time as I was writing the film. I was searching for a way of making a musical animal language that transcended words, and her work with Hockets was like the perfect metaphor for expressing this music as a bridge of feeling and mind. That’s what influenced the creation of this climactic moment, this exaltation between humans and animals. Then I turned to her to actually create that part. I had a score from Dave, but also this Ochi song, which was all performed by a throat whistler named Paul Manalatos. I needed that to turn into music, so it was Mira who came in to do the impossible and to create a hocketed arrangement that could also then harmonize with Dave’s symphonic climax. That was a challenge nobody wanted. I was like, “Please, Mira, I need you!”
Filmmaker: I’m so glad you touched on that because my next question is going to be about developing the Ochi’s musical language and the fact that it feels like something humans can tap into. The fact that you hired a throat whistler makes so much sense. I’d like to know more about crafting this new form of communication and marrying that with the physicality of the puppets .
Saxon: I knew I needed an animal language that felt organic and intricate. I was looking at natural examples, like bird song and dolphin speech, something that maybe was a bunch of high-pitched trilling tones that felt like Morse code of some kind. I also knew it needed to feel like a primate was producing it in their physiognomy. I was like, “Well, humans are primates and we do all sorts of crazy stuff.” So I was looking at what humans do, and I typed in “throat whistling” into YouTube on a blind whim. It’s a cool search query, because all sorts of stuff comes up. I found this guy who had one video on his account. His name is Paul the Birdman Manalatos. He was just in his basement in his sweatpants and he’s like, “Hey guys, I have this thing I can do in the back of my throat that sounds like a bird.” And he opens his mouth and out comes the sound of the Ochi. The actual audio from the YouTube clip is in the movie. The first time we hear them is just a sample of it.
I then sent him the script when we were finally greenlit, and he told me that he was in tears because this was the story of his life. His mother was out of the picture and he’d turned to black metal and throat whistling to express himself. It was just this incredible cosmic connection. Once we were in post-production, I brought him into the studio and we recorded him in the booth—just like you would any other actor going through each line of the script—and he provided this detailed, emotional inflection for every little beat of the Ochi by throat whistling. I started cutting it up, editing it and merging it a little bit here and there with mockingbird samples, raven samples and whale samples for the adult Ochi. So that’s how the sound of the Ochi came about. The unison of them with the puppetry was really something. We couldn’t have playback on set. Our head puppeteer is Rob Tigner. He’s a legendary British puppeteer who worked on Labyrinth and Nicholas Roeg’s The Witches and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Henson version. And he is quarterback of a group of seven people who are all combining to create Baby Ochi’s performance. You have him and then four other people around him controlling each limb of the puppet. And then you have two remote controlled operators doing the face. He’s calling out to all of them the internal monologue of Baby Ochi. He’s saying, “Hmm, what’s that? Oh, I’m interested in that, maybe I’ll eat that bug.” As he’s doing that, he’s providing all the vocalization. And so he’s going [trilling noise] basically as a little stand-in for what the remote controlled face operators are going to do. They got to get that mouth to hit exactly perfect with the head movement and all of that. Then in post, that’s where I’m dubbing his lines.
Filmmaker: I held the Baby Ochi puppet in the lobby, and it’s unassumingly heavy. I’m not surprised that it took that many people to orchestrate its movements.
Saxon: To speak to the heaviness: John Nolan Studios created all the creatures. When I started working with them, they were doing Jurassic World. They are the best in the world at what they do. And they were generous enough to work on my little indie movie with a $10 million budget and a $1 million creature budget. They’re boiling down all of that expertise from a dinosaur scale down into Ochi scale. Baby Ochi’s head is like the size of a grapefruit inside there. It’s just the densest, most intricate set of gears and servos and wires that you’ve ever seen. And Karl Gallivan, who designed the Baby Ochi, deserves all the credit for developing that and then operating his face on set. He knows what it can do and how it should move. Then Adrian Parish at John Nolan Studios designed the animatronics for Mother Ochi, which are like maybe the most detailed and elaborate ape animatronics that have ever been made. All of that development was what we rested the hopes of the movie on. Imagine if the performance of Baby Ochi isn’t what it is? Then we’re kind of dead in the water. This movie lives and dies with that being a believable, emotionally detailed creature. He can hold a scene with Willem Dafoe. He can hold a scene with Helena Zengel.
Filmmaker: During any stage of production, did you seek the feedback of children?
Saxon: We did some test screenings, but there were, like, three or four kids. I think that was just more like, “Do kids like it?” And it was like, “Yeah, they like it more than adults.” Adults have all these notes and a lot of them don’t get it. The four kids we had in that test screening were drawing us pictures and giving it five stars. So they were early adopters.
I think the problem with a lot of kids’ films, and fictional narratives designed to reach kids, is that people try to imagine a kid and what the kid might like and then they write to that. I don’t think anyone can do that well. I think you have a kid inside you that’s still there. You were a kid, you still are a kid, and you just try to please that kid that you still are. Then you don’t have to worry about other kids. Kids are not the easy audience. If I’ve been true to myself, I know they’re gonna get it more than some 50 year old man. He’s gonna have all these weird expectations clouding his vision. He’ll have all these thoughts about what is a fantasy-adventure movie and what am I referencing and all this crap, whereas the kids are open and alert to what the thing is. Yeah, they’re wonderful.
