CALL OF THE WILD

When Robin Wright chose to make an off-grid survival story, she didn’t expect challenges such as last-minute self-casting, extreme weather and a hungry, uninvited bear. She tells Total Film how her feature directorial debut, LAND, wasn’t a walk in the park…

- JANE CROWTHER

Every morning in the car on the way to work on Netflix show House Of Cards, Robin Wright would listen to the news. And it was rarely the type of news you want to hear. “About three years ago, in our country, we were experiencing, almost biweekly, these random shootings,” she recalls of the time. “I just was waking up every day and listening to the horrible news and I just couldn’t get that question out of my mind: how do [the families of the victims] find their way? How do they get through that time of grief, when everything you have known, that existence that you have had, will never be the same again?”

Those queries were sitting in her head as she looked for a feature film script to direct, having helmed episodes of House Of Cards from Season 2 to 6, when Jesse Chatham’s screenplay passed across her desk. The story of Edee – a Chicago woman ripped apart by the loss of her family who tries to find some sort of physical and emotional anchor in living alone, humbly, in a no-power/water/phone cabin in the Wyoming wilderness – seemed to offer a balm of fortitude in a time of social and political unrest. “This script kind of spoke to the hope and resilience of human beings, and that we need each other to get through difficult times,” Wright nods, pulling a black scarf a little tighter around her neck. “And then to release the movie after this long year we’ve endured, I thought: how empowering to have that message come up now...”