Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

This Is Our Land
An Interview with Athina Rachel Tsangari
By Jordan Cronk

Harvest is Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s first feature in nearly a decade, and if it bears the scars of its arduous production and outsized ambition, it does so in a manner appropriate for its story of rural hysteria and preindustrial agrarian advancement. Based on a novel of the same name by British author Jim Crace, the film centers on a provincial farming community in the northern United Kingdom—as in the book, neither the exact location nor time period is specified—that must deal with the onset on modernity when outside forces threaten their way of life.

In a village ruled by mob mentality and paranoia—witch hunts and various forms of medieval punishment are the order of the day—a widowed farmhand named Walter stands out for his enlightened sensitivities and nonconformist attitude. Played by Caleb Landry Jones, Walt is a rumpled misfit that exists both inside and outside of the social hierarchy, maintaining relationships with the townsfolk, including his childhood friend and lord of the manor, Charles Kent (Harry Melling), as well as a newly arrived cartographer (Arinzé Kene) whose mapmaking duties incite anxiety among the locals. When Kent’s cousin and heir to the estate Master Jordan (Frank Dillane) turns up to claim the land and turn it into a commercial livestock farm, these fears become reality.

As in her previous features, Tsangari betrays a fascination with closed communities and patriarchal absurdities, which she traces here to a moment when old world traditions were, for better or worse, giving way to new ideas related to industry, community, and capitalism. Yet Harvest differs in look and feel. Working on 16mm with cinematographer Sean Price Williams, Tsangari creates images that appear newly liberated from the formal rigor of Attenberg (2010) and Chevalier (2015), two films very much a part of the unfortunately named Greek Weird Wave. If Harvest is “weird,” it’s due to its unconventional approach to period storytelling, forgoing rose-tinted nostalgia or old-fashioned stateliness in favor of feverish immersion and earthbound tactility. (A marvel of practical magic, the film’s authenticity seeps through in large part thanks to Nathan Parker’s weather-beaten production design.) You can feel—and, in certain instances, see—the blood, sweat, and piss passing between these characters, who, in the opening sequence, react to a barn being set on fire by binding a pair of suspects to the town pillory, where they’ll remain on public display until the closing moments of the film. By then, little is left of the village as it once was; claimed by industry and engulfed by the future, the land will be transformed in the name of progress, but at what cost to its people, or the environment? Tsangari leaves these questions hanging like an ellipsis, as if to remind us that while we can’t rewrite past, it’s still possible to shape the future.

I sat down with Tsangari a day before Harvest’s premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival for what I came to find out was her first interview about the film. (“Interviews are a bit torturous for me,” she said when she arrived, “having to put things into words when my approach is about defying language.”) We discussed the project’s logistical challenges, Landry Jones’s idiosyncratic approach to acting, and her position as a Greek filmmaker working abroad.

Reverse Shot: How did you come to Jim Crace’s novel and the idea to adapt it?

Athina Rachel Tsangari: There was already a draft of the script by Joslyn Barnes, who was also the film’s originating producer. Jos and our two other producers, Michael Weber and Rebecca O’Brien, sent me the script, along with the novel. I was immediately fascinated by Walter Thirsk, the main character. The book is a first-person narration by Walt—a fever dream. I saw it from the start as a Western, and my first thought was to shoot in Scotland, in its rugged western part, the historical location of the Highland Clearances. It was interesting to me that the apocalyptic loss of an insular community occurs in the space of six days. So in terms of the mise-en-scène, the immediate question was: how do we depict this through the interiority of Walt’s voice? Jos and I traced hour by hour the land’s takeover by nascent capitalism. The story is quite primal, a fairy tale from hell. We never saw it as a historical drama. We found a cluster of abandoned steadings in an estate by the name of Inverlonan that its owner Lupi Moll was in the process of rewilding. Our production designer Nathan Parker proposed a series of intelligent interventions that respected the timelessness of both the land and Jim’s story.

RS: Did you and Joslyn work together on a rewrite of her draft, or did you take it over once you came on board to direct?

ART: We had our first meeting in New York City the day the pandemic broke out. We then worked remotely, exchanging drafts. It was a tricky adaptation because Walt is a central character who is, in many ways, absent. He’s a riddle. And I love that. I love that in our take on the Western, the main hero is not a hero at all, very much like in ’70s American cinema.

RS: Is that period you’re generally influenced by?

ART: Yes. One of my all-time favorite films is Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971).

RS: You can see some of that film here, especially in the way you direct the ensemble and depict a closed community.

ART: I paid lot of attention to the sound. We had every single actor mic’d, like in an Altman film, so they were free to roam and speak at will. I tend to shoot entire scenes without breaking. In that way, the scenes don’t really end; they keep morphing at every take and no one knows when they’re on or off camera.

RS: Did this allow for certain scenes or characters to develop in ways that weren’t written?

ART: During the rehearsal period, the entire ensemble was there, and we played and moved around physicalizing the script, removing unnecessary verbiage. It was a physically demanding film, for the crew and the cast, because of weather and the terrain and time limitations. It's not exactly improvisational, but once we start—and because we keep shooting the scenes over and over again without stopping—it evolves. And then in the editing, another being comes alive.

RS: That’s interesting because the formal rigor of your films doesn’t necessarily suggest an open approach. But it sounds like you allowed for random incidents or ideas from the actors to shape a lot of the scenes. Do you feel in most cases that variations like these are better than what you had initially conceived?

ART: It’s always better, but the ideas or incidents were never random. We were living and working together. There were no extras. All of the villagers were people from the area, farmers and craftspeople. This is their land. They taught me a lot. I was there on and off for about two-and-a half years. We sowed heirloom seeds of rye, barley, and flax in non-arable land and the seeds miraculously took root. Brenna, a young Scottish-Canadian, plowed the fields with a hand rotavator, yard by yard. She was determined to bring the soil back to life. Everything you see we harvested as we were shooting.

RS: So what's there otherwise?

ART: Pastures for sheep. But the plan now is for the land to keep being cultivated by the owners. There’s a return to the land movement rising, especially in Scotland, of young families who move from the big cities and start living off small crofts, partly subsidized by the government.

RS: I read an interview with Caleb in Variety where he talked about the difficulty of the production and how he “gave you hell” as a result of how invested he got in the character. Is that how you would describe it?

ART: The shoot was often hell, but no, Caleb did not give me hell. There were moments when we disagreed about the temperature or tone of a scene, but I found this healthy. He was just so present. He usually plays high energy characters. Walt was difficult for him. But I wanted that bifurcating energy—this very committed presence that he has in everything he does, as a human, as an artist, as a musician, as a thinker. After meeting with him a few times, where it sort of felt like he was auditioning me, he suddenly said, “So, who’s my dialect coach? I start tomorrow”. This was during the SAG strike. But since this was a European co-production, Rebecca managed to get him cleared. And the first thing he did when he arrived in Oban was buy these boots and walked for miles from the little town where we were living to where we were going to shoot. Walt’s cottage was still being built, but he started living there and helping Andy the sheep farmer, who ended up in the movie. He wanted to get his fingernails dirty, like Walt. And from then on none of us ever heard him in any other accent other than Scottish. He never breaks.

RS: Yeah, in that same interview he mentions how he was in character as Walt during the Venice press conference for Dogman (2024) last year. Were you aware of that at the time?

ART: I didn’t know, but I would’ve been surprised if he broke character. He left for a day-and-a-half. He’s in almost every scene in the film. And toward the end, we were doing five scenes a day in the pouring rain. So he stayed in character, but not in this kind of academic way. It’s just what he does. He can’t help it. He never wrapped earlier than the crew. If we had something to do, he would just stick around. He was kind of like my guardian angel. We had an unspoken code. When we disagreed and dug our heels in, this code helped us through it. Walt is all about inaction, about being an observer, an outsider; about yearning to be part of something; mourning. Walt’s always in the past or the future. He’s never in the present, while, at the same time, shit is happening everywhere, fast. Everyone's so innocent. It’s Eden. And then the devil suddenly arrives. I was interested in this threshold, in that moment where innocence gets ambushed, then corrupted. It’s a thankless story—there’s basically no redemption, no peripeteia, in the Greek tragedy sense. But I also didn't want anyone to be a victim. Jos and I changed the women quite a bit from the novel, they got stronger.

RS: They’re not like that in the book?

ART: No, they’re quite absent as characters in the book. Here they become sort of action heroines in a male community of cowardice, of inaction. Kitty, Anne, Mistress Beldam, and Lizzie, the little girl, who in the end becomes a turncoat. She embraces capitalism. She embraces the master. She is seduced by the future.

RS: While the movie is tonally and stylistically quite different than your previous features, it does, like those films, deal with a small or insulated community. Was this something that drew you to the book, as something that could connect the film with your other work, or was it more coincidental?

ART: It wasn’t conscious, but it’s also not coincidental. I like closed worlds that get disrupted—worlds that exist out of time, out of place…

RS: That’s especially true here. We’ve been talking about where film was shot, but neither the exact setting nor the time period is ever identified.

ART: I was more interested in the fact that this incident was part of the first mass exodus, the first recorded refugee movement in the Western world. And then the Industrial Revolution began. My grandparents were farmers who lost their land. I didn’t grow up on the farm, but I spent all my summers on their fields. I plowed, watered, scythed, picked cotton and corn. The film is the end result of a process, but it’s almost like the process, and how we got there, was even more important: how we went on a quest and found the land and its people; how we lived together and found the heirloom seeds that were able to survive in the hostile ground; how we died the yarn of the costumes with native plants; how all the builders and stone masons were from the area. The assembly of a community, or a really big family, was the negation of the community’s self-distraction in the novel. I hope that some of that spirit remains in the film.

RS: You mentioned earlier that you thought of the movie as a kind of Western, which didn’t totally occur to me until a montage late in the film of various characters framed in portrait-like tableaux, similar to John Ford, or even Straub–Huillet.

ART: Those are amongst my northern stars, for sure. I'm constantly consuming, stealing, borrowing cinema. It all passes through me. One film that I re-watched while I was editing wasArthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks (1976). It's incredible. Completely anarchic.

RS: I’m wondering if you can comment on contemporary Greek cinema and your place in it? Do you first and foremost consider yourself a Greek filmmaker? Compared to a lot of your contemporaries, your films aren’t as easy to categorize and, especially lately, they feel less “Greek,” whether stylistically or thematically.

ART: It’s getting impossible to make films in my country. The maximum amount of money that I can get to make a feature from the Greek Film Center—as someone at my age, with a few films under my belt—is maybe €200,000, unlike in all other European countries. I want to shoot in Greece again. I am a Greek filmmaker, but at the same time, I cannot help but be a Greek filmmaker in any language. There’s a lot of Greek cinema in Harvest, specifically the agrarian dramas of revolt made during and after the dictatorship. Niko Papatakis, for example—he's one of my heroes. I think all Greek filmmakers nowadays are heroes, because it’s harder and harder to get films made, and it takes lots of resilience. Harvest was a hands-on, handmade production—very much the way I work in Greece.

RS: So, in the end, it didn’t feel much different than before?

ART: Yes and no. We definitely had more money. I had great producers, instead of producing on my own under our company Haos Film. So that was amazing. What I went after—an immersive, unmediated experience—cost us a lot of sanity. But in the end, it was all worth it. And it was important for me, even though I would never make a film with a single “message,” to make a political film about what it means to become people on the move. We're all people on the move.