A couple’s quiet life is thrown into turmoil when an uninvited stranger shows up at their door with a startling proposal in Director Garth Davis’s sci-fi drama, Foe.
Davis’s film tells the story of Hen and Junior, who live on an impoverished failing farm. Their world is turned upside down when a stranger arrives at their farm and informs Junior that he has been selected to be sent to live on a large space station, but Hen will be left behind in the company of a robot copy of him.
On October 1, after the DGA membership screening in New York, Davis discussed the making of Foe during a Q&A moderated by Director Darius Marder (Sound of Metal). He also discussed the film in a conversation moderated by Director Tanya Hamilton (Night Catches Us) following the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles on October 8.
During the conversation in New York, Davis spoke about the challenges of building the characters with his actors in a film that required a bit of heavy lifting to maintain the mystery.
“Probably the most exciting part for me was building the characters. We had so many complex truths and secret rivers and all these incredible layers that we had to find in a really compelling way. I think the most important thing was making sure that we never cheated if that makes sense — like you can cheat a performance to help the mystery of the story — but we had to somehow make sure that the framework of each of the scenes was at every point the actors were being truthful. On first viewing you're thinking of seeing a story but actually the real truth is something quite different.”
Davis’s other directorial credits include the features Mary Magdalene and P.I.N.S.; and episodes of the series Top of the Lake and Love My Way. He was nominated for the 2010 DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Commercials for Shadow Puppets, U.S. Cellular and the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film for his 2016 feature, Lion, which won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in First-Time Feature Film.
Davis has been a DGA member since 2007.