Interview: Writer/Director Nadia Litz Gives Us a Look into THE PEOPLE GARDEN

This week, FilmBuff releases writer/director Nadia Litz’s atmospheric mystery thriller, The People Garden, in Los Angeles theaters and on VOD. The story follows a young woman named Sweetpea (Dree Hemingway) into the depths of a Japanese forest as she looks for her missing rock star boyfriend, who vanished from the set of a music video that he put together at the last minute.

Daily Dead recently had the opportunity to speak with Litz about what inspired The People Garden, collaborating with her cast on the project, what she learned from making The People Garden, and more.

Great to speak with you today, Nadia. I’m really fascinated by the Suicide Forest, so I thought this was a really interesting take on that environment. Was this something that you just tried to go in and explore, or was it something you researched? I'm curious what the draw was for you.

Nadia Litz: There are two ways of answering that question. First, I had to figure out what was the draw to the story, and for me the story originated from Sweetpea. I was just coming out of film school, and I really love directors like David Lynch and Jim Jarmusch, who have a really strong storytelling sensibility that I find myself often connecting with the most.

The one thing, though, is that their films are never female-driven, and so it wasn't until I saw Morvern Callar, a film by Lynne Ramsay, which has this great female protagonist, that I wanted to create a story like that. The story for the movie itself comes from the forest. When I was in college, I was studying film theory and taking a lot of Japanese cinema classes. In one of the classes, they taught The Complete Manual of Suicide, which was written by Wataru Tsurumi. It was published in 1993, and I was studying it in relation to Japanese culture having this honor related to suicide.

This book was really subversive and dark, but it was almost like a dark humor, a political satire of this notion that there's honor to that. It just felt like a place I wanted to visit in my mind—not literally—but in my mind. I just was imagining what that place could mean from all angles.

I thought Dree was really fantastic in this, but I appreciated the cast you put into these supporting roles, because it was very unexpected. Pamela [Anderson] felt like she was plucked right out of a Lynch movie, and I enjoyed seeing one of my personal favorites, James Le Gros, pop up in this as well. How did you go about gathering this cast together? 

Nadia Litz: I’ve also done some acting, but I don't really do it as much anymore. Before this, I had just made a movie with James Le Gros, and I'd never met him before, but we just hit it off. I have the utmost respect for him and I think he's a wonderful actor, but he’s been tragically underrepresented in films. I could watch him for days. We developed a friendship and I was telling him about this project, and I decided to rewrite the character of the director specifically for him. I showed him the script and he was like, "Yeah, I'm in." He loved it, and that was super great.

With Dree and Pam, they're both super interesting women. Dree had recently been in this movie called Starlet, which was really good. Dree carries the whole film and plays a porn star, but she does it in this way that's so sweet and so natural, it was really incredible to watch. She reminded me of Elle Fanning or Kirsten Dunst, and I got lucky that she also loved the script.

And Pam, wonderful Pam. I had seen her when she was revamping herself a few years ago and she had cut off all of her hair. She just struck me as someone who is willing to go there and challenge herself, and that's what this character was. She was signed on to do a Werner Herzog film at the time, and we had the same casting director, but then the Herzog film fell through.

So, Pam was looking for something indie to do, and this role was clearly so right for her. She responded to the script and loved the script, and then she called me from her house and we talked for about an hour and a half. She was so clearly right for it and up for really investigating and making this weird character into a version of her own persona. She's really lovely in the film. She's different and like you said, plucked from a David Lynch film. The entire cast was great.

There has definitely been a lot of discussion these days about the lack of female representation within the filmmaking community. That being said, how rewarding does it feel to not only get The People Garden made, but to also finally have it being released this week as well?

Nadia Litz: It feels great to put it out there. It's really great when people like yourself, and more off the cuff, on the fringe publications who have a really huge following, can get behind the film like this. For me, it's being really proud that you tried to change something in a small way and put that film out there. It's incredibly hard to make a film, but putting it out there is like nothing I've ever experienced before. It's incredibly difficult, especially if you're not mainstream.

Now that The People Garden is about to premiere, looking back at this whole process, what would you say is the biggest thing that you took away from this experience?

Nadia Litz: You're never done learning from the experience, honestly. I'm still learning from the experience today, and I will tomorrow. It doesn't end, it's not like you do something and you're like, "Oh, I got that." You just scrutinize what you did a million times more for the next project and bring all of that into something new. And at the same time, you're still continuing to learn. The learning process doesn't end, and that is exciting, especially if you're the kind of person that wants to engage with life that way. And that’s who I am.