A father travels from Oklahoma to France to come to the aid his daughter in Director Tom McCarthy’s drama, Stillwater.
McCarthy’s film tells the story of Bill Baker (Matt Damon), an unemployed oil-rig roughneck who flies to Marseille to visit his estranged daughter Allison (Abigail Breslin) who is imprisoned for a murder she claims she did not commit. Eager to regain her trust, Bill takes matters into his own hands and embarks on a mission to exonerate Allison despite language barriers, cultural differences and a complicated legal system.
On August 1, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, McCarthy discussed the making of Stillwater during a Q&A moderated by Director Scott Cooper (Antlers). During the conversation, McCarthy spoke about how he and his longtime collaborator, Cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, used techniques to visually enhance the story without compromising the performances.
“We believe in stepping back and really letting the world and the actors play and sort of giving them that space to do it. In this case, we were very static in Oklahoma. We were anamorphic in Oklahoma kind of wide frame and short depth of field just so we could really feel his isolation and his grounded-ness. Then when we got to Marseille, we went spherical, went very handheld, just moved the camera more. We wanted to feel the energy, and it was a little dirtier. The frame was dirtier which is Marseille, in a great way. There’s still a classical storytelling approach to what I do even though this structure is very unclassical. It’s combining those elements.”
McCarthy’s other directorial credits include the feature includes the feature films The Station Agent, The Visitor, Win Win, The Cobbler and Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made; and episodes of 13 Reasons Why. He was also nominated for the 2015 DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Theatrical Feature film for Spotlight.
McCarthy has been a DGA member since 2009.
You can listen to McCarthy's Q&A by clicking the podcast episode embedded below. You can find more DGA podcast episodes here.