Growing up, we all heard stories, fairy tales and fables. When we move into adulthood, we sometimes look back and reminisce about how our actions have been shaped by yarns of distant lands and unyielding creatures. Do the themes of those stories automatically become ingrained in us without our knowledge? In Alexander Thompson’s wondrous and horrific coming-of-age, Em & Selma Go Griffin Hunting, a young girl is forced to take part in a ritual to grow into the next phase of her life. Thompson’s film, though, details what happens when we buck against the lore of tradition.
The first thing you’ll notice about Thompson’s film is how lush and detailed everything is. With every viewing that I have, I cannot believe at how much the filmmaker packs the frame with so much perspective and temperature. When I learned about how long this idea was marinating in Thompson’s mind, it made total sense.
“I first conceived this ten years ago when I was about to go to graduate school,” Thompson says. “I love the work of Francis Ford Coppola, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Carl Dreyer–a lot of mid-century, European filmmakers, and I was a fan of German silent cinema. I love the art that goes into making big spectacles, but I gravitate more towards the former. For years, I wondered how I reconciled these two loves to make something more personal. The title actually just popped into my head, and then I saw it all in one go. It was going to be in black and white, and every frame was going to look like an Andrew Wyeth painting set during the Dust Bowl era. The whole movie just leaped out in this ten page form, but I didn’t want to half-ass any of it.
We shot the movie in January of 2021, and we finished just in time for our premiere at Sundance this year. When you don’t have a lot of money, the trade off is time, so we took our time with making this.”
There have been a number of ambitious, handsomely produced shorts this year that have leaned towards fantasy or horror (another is Matthew Scheffler’s The Traveler). When you have an uncompromising vision like Thompson’s, you don’t settle. When it comes to the more complicated aspects of the visual storytelling, Thompson knew that he just had to reach out to begin the collaborative process.
“One of the earliest people I reached out to was Gabriel Beauvais, who is a CG supervisor for Folks VFX up in Montreal,” he says. “I’d seen creatures he’s designed that I thought were really brilliant, and I just wrote to him. In the visual effects world, they use ArtStation, which is basically like LinkedIn for concept artists. I just laid it all out on the table that my script was my baby, and I wanted to give it all that I had. He hopped on a call with me to see what we could brainstorm, and he was responsible for designing the baby griffin and the little fairy characters, the wood nymph characters, and, later on, he came on to wear a bunch of different hats. He rendered every shot for us, and he was the first hire before I had a DP or before we had a cast. By the time that we approached Milly Shapiro and Pollyanna McIntosh, we already had more than the base designs done. Rather than have a tennis ball on a stick, our production designer, Phil Salick, could actually build proper scale styrofoam puppet heads. Milly had a real eyeline when she was handing off the baby to The Queen at the end.”
One might assume that Thompson would lean into the monstrous side of the creatures, but he never hides them. We see them from the very first shot. Remember when animators of Disney Studios would invite us in to show how they observed lion cubs or went into the field to see how gazelles jumped through fields? That’s how Thompson and his fellow artists approached capture life inside animals that don’t exist. I love that we know the griffins are watching Em and Selma as much as they are watching them.
“I told everyone that we weren’t making a creature feature or a monster movie,” Thompson says. “These are living, breathing animals that inhabit the world that Em and Selma live in. They are a bespoke part of this reality, and we’re going to treat them almost like they are banal and ordinary. If this were Jurassic Park or Alien, you would build to reveal the animals–maybe a claw here or a reval there. Even though we kind of do that with The Queen, we show you everything from frame one, because I want you to immediately buy into this reality where they are normal animals.
They’re not overly anthropomorphized–I was going for documentary realism. We would constantly be looking at not other movies for reference points but non-fiction films or animals at zoos. You know when you see cows and giraffes and their ears will sort of twitch or move? That’s what I wanted, so, at a design level, we needed to make sure that the ears are catilaginous enough that they can do that. They can bend, flip and flop. Depending on their personality, they could move forward or become sharp to create a more threatening silhouette. And those are just the ears. Originally, I wanted to do feathers, but we couldn’t afford to go that route. We looked at mooses and vultures to try and make a chimera of the real world, and we talked about avian dinosaurs.”
Griffin Hunting focuses on not just a tradition but a mother and daughter. Shapiro plays Em, a tentative, gentle spirit who has reservations of hunting another animal. In order for Em and her mother, Selma, to return home with pride and dignity, Em must slaughter her first griffin. Alone in the woods, mother and daughter scout and prepare to hunt, as Em carefully chooses her words questioning why they have to do what they do. In a tense moment, Selma explodes and says, ‘You don’t think I didn’t hate it too? I hated the dagger in my hand.’
“If you don’t buy Em and Selma’s relationship, it all falls apart,” he says. “There is a generational divide that we are playing with here. The old guard views this ritual, and it can be a proxy for anything. I’ve had people from religious families approach me and tell me that they felt the same pressure that Em feels in our film. We had seen Milly in Hereditary, and some people don’t even know that she was honored with a Tony Award for Matilda on Broadway when she was about 11 years old. She was studying film at NYU at the time, and when we started talking to her about joining, she was able to articulate everything the movie was about and why her character was important.
Pollyana came to us from the recommendation of our producer, Roger Mayer, who knew the filmmaker Lucky McKee. She had done many years of The Walking Dead and did a lot of rough and tumble things in The Woman. Pollyanna knows how to use her body but also how to feel austere and unapproachable. It’s those high cheekbones. When we see those little cracks begin to form, she’s incredible in those moments. I created a very detailed document that basically broke down the entire genealogy. I went down a rabbit hole and made a history of where their family is from and established that Selma is a Dust Bowl era immigrant who came to the west relatively recently. In the earlier draft of the story, we saw a couple quick flashes to her hunt and it was aggressively unpleasant, involving a baby dragon and its mother’s womb. Even though it was cut from the final draft, we all thought it was important to have those conversations to build on their characters.”
There is a moment where we feel the horror of what Em is going through. She is away from Selma’s gaze and she connects with a wood nymph. They look at each other and have an understanding even if they can’t pinpoint it. Immediately following that connection, another nymph flies in, rips the first’s wings off, and assaults it. We need that moment, as terrifying as it is to witness it. This is not a Disney tale.
“That’s the moment that the rug is pulled out from not just Em but for us, as the audience,” he says. “Innocence is lost, and that is a scene that a lot of people are shocked by. In a lot of ways, you can’t fully understand what the film is telling you without that scene. It’s the visceral horror of that moment, and it just sinks in. I understand their reaction–I really do. But it needs to be there to show what Em is experiencing and feeling.”
