Benh Zeitlin
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Filmography
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Days of Heaven (1978)
Directed by Terrence Malick
influenced Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Dialogue Visuals Themes Characters
I don’t really buy that a tiny girl would talk like Hushpuppy, who narrates “Beasts of the Southern Wild” with a plainspoken lyricism that recalls “Days of Heaven,” but the movie is a fable, the narration is beautiful and Wallis makes it sing.
Comparisons to Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” and David Gordon Green’s “George Washington” are inevitable and appropriate, as Zeitlin emulates those movies’ sense of reverie and poetry and their ability to find aesthetic beauty in the natural, mundane world.
Reminds me of The Band - Music from the Big Pink - its on another level, there's magic realism, bits of Mallick's "Days of Heaven", post apocalyptic fantasy and everything what Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things are" should have been.
Benh Zeitlin‘s feature directorial debut feels like one that will be cherished by kids for decades to come, and lead Hushpuppy – played by six-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis – might be remembered as iconic a child protagonist as To Kill a Mockingbird ‘s Scout, Days of Heaven ‘s Linda, and Where the Wild Things Are ‘s Max (the three pictures it shares the most in common with).
You can, perhaps, already guess the film’s influences: movies such as George Washington , Days of Heaven and Ballast, yes, but also real-world events such as Katrina, the BP oil spill and even melting polar ice caps (we see glimpses of strange, prehistoric creatures arising from the softening ice and trampling their way toward the Bathtub).
Report: It’s difficult to explain exactly what Beasts Of The Southern Wild is, though it’s undoubtedly something extraordinary: like a live-action Miyazaki film, with Days Of Heaven narration, set in a dirt-poor community at an unspecified time of crisis.
The Peanut Butter Falcon (2019)
Directed by Tyler Nilson
influenced by Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Visuals Music
The story is accompanied by gorgeous cinematography that evokes fellow South-set indies like Mud or Beasts of the Southern Wild in the way it finds strange magic and beauty in abandoned, overgrown places.
At times, “The Peanut Butter Falcon” might remind viewers of a pair of 2012 films “Mud” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which also followed humble characters in coastal environments.
And the opening few minutes of the actual movie, in which our hero attempts a cute and kooky jailbreak while a banjo-tinged b-side from the “Beasts of the Southern Wild” score wails on the soundtrack, seem determined to confirm your most cynical suspicions.
A sense of endearing earnestness and fantastical realism bear-hugs the whole of The Peanut Butter Falcon and fans of Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild will find similarly soulful fantasy riddled with American pathos.
There are worse things you can say about a film than it's like Beasts of the Southern Wild if Frank Darabont directed it.
The Florida Project (2017)
Directed by Sean Baker
influenced by Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Characters Visuals Themes
As Moonee, Prince has the sort of coming-out party that greeted Quvenzhane Wallis in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and Jacob Tremblay in “Room.”
The focus here is still on marginalized people, but Baker and Bergoch have graduated to 35mm film, which perfectly suits the empty-candy-wrapper aesthetics of the place, and also recalls the dreamlike weirdness of Beasts of the Southern Wild—minus soundtrack music, except for one of the most riveting finishes you’ll encounter this or any other year.
There are exceptions to the rule, such as Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, Lee Daniels’s Precious, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, and Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild.
Like Quvenzhane Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild she has much to teach us about the disappointments of poverty and the character qualities necessary for survival.
While the impulse is admirable, it results in a film that veers dangerously close to the kind of aestheticized poverty porn that bedeviled such similar enterprises as “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “American Honey.”
Wind River (2017)
Directed by Taylor Sheridan
influenced by Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Visuals
Much is contributed by the stellar lensing of Ben Richardson (Beasts of the Southern Wild) and the beautifully spooky score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, which so mournfully echoes the one Cave created for The Proposition (2005).
With the aid of the cinematographer Ben Richardson (Beasts of the Southern Wild), Sheridan makes the landscape itself—snowswept, dotted with trees and outcroppings of rock, carved up by the treads of snowmobiles—a character as vivid as the human ones: austere, secretive, and ominous.
Also very real (though shot in snowy Utah, not Wyoming) is the imposing Western landscape richly photographed by “Beasts of the Southern Wild” cinematographer Ben Richardson in areas so remote that equipment and crew needed snowmobiles and snowcats to get to the locations.
The icy landscapes are beautiful framed by cinematographer Ben Richardson ( Beasts of the Southern Wild , 2012), who gives the film’s frosty geography width and depth.
As Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ windy score elicits primal moans of the wild, Sheridan works with cinematographer Ben Richardson (“Beasts of the Southern Wild”) to paint a Coen-style atmosphere, recalling the bloody snow of “Fargo” (1996) and anthropological critique of “No Country for Old Men” (2007).
With the color white predominating, cinematographer Ben Richardson's ("Beasts of the Southern Wild") achievement cannot be overstated, his crisp imagery using the color to enclose, unite and separate.
The Tree of Life (2011)
Directed by Terrence Malick
influenced Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Visuals Themes Plot
Director Benh Zeitlin’s film, which has echoes of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, is at once folksy and apocalyptic, as it follows a six-year-old heroine in a delta shack, facing the possible end of the world.
“Beasts of the Southern Wild,’’ whose mood is enhanced with Cajun-style music, has been compared by some to Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life’’ because of its intoxicating visuals and the presence of prehistoric beasts in both films.
Similar to The Tree of Life grand universal themes are juxtaposed to an intimate personal story.
Ending much like Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life , which also moves from the prehistoric to the apocalyptic, the film is variously poetic, mysterious and opaque, a bit like the work of the African director Souleymane Cissé but without the depth.
It's a flawed comparison -- and indeed, any comparison for a work as completely and startlingly unique as this will be flawed -- but I kept imagining "Beasts of the Southern Wild" as a pagan, powerful, Godless (but not loveless or hopeless) variation on "The Tree of Life," where parents and children cope with the passage of time and the end of life in a series of moments built as much on visual poetry as character interactions.
It's also the kind of film that's likely to polarize audiences, in much the same way as last year's "The Tree of Life."
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
Directed by John Carpenter
influenced Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
His excellent scores for (among others) Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween and Escape from New York are highly effective in their relative simplicity, and it's impossible not to respond to their hypnotic rhythms.
Swiss Army Man (2016)
Directed by Daniel Kwan
influenced by Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Music
The grave yet whimsical tenor of the film is echoed perfectly in the score by Andy Hull and Robert McDowell of the Manchester Orchestra, which evokes the tang of magical realism imbued in “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” though what’s at stake here is more weighty and rooted in the earthly now.
His particular strain of authenticity recalls Quvenzhane Wallis’ fearless debut in Beasts of the Southern Wild.
There is even room for " Beasts of the Southern Wild "'s Dwight Henry (as a slave) and Quvenzhané Wallis (as Northup's daughter).
There are also quite a few one-scene cameos by great actors like Paul Giamatti, Alfre Woodard, and Michael K. Williams, as well as “Beasts of the Southern Wild”‘s Quvenzhané Wallis and Saturday Night Live standout and future comedy movie star Taran Killam.
Among the lesser-known actors, Lupita Nyong’o and Adepero Oduye are stunning as the most victimized of the female slaves, and both Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry from last year’s award-winning Beasts of the Southern Wild make cameos.
He and his family --- wife Anne (Kelsey Scott), daughter Margaret ( Quvenzhané Wallis , "Beasts of the Southern Wild"), and son Alonzo (Cameron Zeigler) --- are educated, well-dressed and well-respected around town.
Helpless in every sense of the word, longing to get back to his wife and kids (one of them played by Beasts of the Southern Wild girl wonder Quvenzhane Wallis), Northup nevertheless keeps a smart—even cunning—head once he becomes Southern plantation chattel.
Room (2015)
Directed by Lenny Abrahamson
influenced by Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Characters
He is a hyperactive dreamer whose colorful stories recall the potent eccentricity of Hushpuppy’s narration from “ Beasts of the Southern Wild ,” another film about a young optimist born into a harrowing void.
Moonlight (2016)
Directed by Barry Jenkins
influenced by Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Visuals Themes
When he wants to take a warm bath, Little is obliged to heat the water on the stove and use dish soap for bubbles — just one of many details that lends texture to the portrait, which ditches the superficial faux-naturalism of turbulent handheld cinematography (à la “Beasts of the Southern Wild”) for seductive Steadicam lensing, reinforced by a vigorous gush of classical music (courtesy of composer Nicholas Britell) at regular intervals.
Best suited for those who found brilliance in Beasts of the Southern Wild, here comes a hackneyed tale of a young black man’s passage from childhood to maturity in a tough Miami neighborhood.
The “Beasts of the Southern Wild” composer summons his signature tremble and swell to set the stage for a movie that eschews the vast adventure of “Finding Nemo” for something more in-the-moment and driven by the capriciousness of youth.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)
Directed by Taika Waititi
influenced by Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Themes
With something for the big kid in all of us, Hunt for the Wilderpeople pours a dose of the mystery and wonderment of Beasts of the Southern Wild, the sense of loss and troubled childhoods of Son of Rambow and the reckless, carefree abandonment of outlaws on the run in Thelma & Louise.
Short Term 12 (2013)
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton
influenced by Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Themes
The whole cast here is good – even Gallagher Jr., who has never quite worked for me on Sorkin’s HBO drama – but the film belongs to Larson and writer/director Destin Cretton, who has made a major statement through drama that feels as important as Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild” did last year.