It feels appropriate that director Isaiah Saxon is being interviewed in front of a pile of books that chronicle the work of such arts legends as Bertolt Brecht, Darryl F. Zanuck and Jean-Luc Godard. Sitting inside the in-office library at the New York headquarters of A24, his film’s distributor, Saxon rattles off the many names and movies that shaped his own love of cinema.
“Around the age of 10, my dad started sharing films with me, taking me to the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, where we’d see Lawrence of Arabia, 2001: A Space Odyssey,” says Saxon. “That began my love affair with movies. Which then graduated to stuff like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Powder, JFK.”
Yet anyone who watches Saxon’s feature directorial debut this weekend, the highly stylized new fantasy The Legend of Ochi, might assume that the filmmaker’s influences were more along the lines of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, The NeverEnding Story, The Dark Crystal or Gremlins – the kind of eighties childhood catnip whose cute-creature legacies seem baked into Ochi.
“It’s easy to think I’m drawing on childhood nostalgia here, but I’m just not. I’ve never seen Gremlins. I only saw The NeverEnding Story when I was in my 20s, and even then it was just to look at the effects,” says Saxon. “I would say this movie is just as much influenced by Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas.”
While Saxon clarifies that he’ll get to Gremlins eventually – and he’s at least seen Gremlins 2: The New Batch – the prioritization of Wenders over someone like Joe Dante makes sense once you watch Ochi.
Not so much a zany genre-mash as it is a deeply felt ode to the pains of adolescent loneliness, Ochi follows a young girl named Yuri (Helena Zengel) who lives on the fictional island of Carpathia. But her sleepy existence is jolted awake one day when she encounters a lost cub belonging to the goblin-like primates who roam her land – much to the consternation of Yuri’s father (played with wild-eyed grace by Willem Dafoe). Determined to reunite the baby Ochi with its tribe, Yuri embarks on a surreal adventure across a fantastical land that feels unstuck in time – a gigantic world that Saxon created for only $10-million.
“Our whole creature budget was just $1-million, so a lot of it has to do with just cutting all the right corners and none of the wrong ones,” says Saxon, who spent years dreaming up Ochi while directing music videos for the likes of Grizzly Bear and Bjork. “So much of it has to do with planning. And then the shoot itself is a gun-to-your-head 37 days, filming as much as you can.”
While Saxon might not have had the resources of his heroes Stanley Kubrick or David Lean, he did have the luxury of time: three years of postproduction work, which allowed him the space to personally create more than 200 matte background paintings, which helped conjure Ochi’s mystical environs.
“We may have shot in the most epic possible landscapes in Romania, but maybe the weather wasn’t right that day, so the matte paintings are about adding in fog and mist, changing anything we can to create the feeling and tone,” explains Saxon. “And part of having not as much money is that you can still have the time.”
Ironically, the remarkably detailed and crisp visuals of Ochi ended up inspiring a culturally backward discourse online this past fall. After the film’s trailer was released, some spectators immediately thought that the relatively low-budget film looked too clean and too slick to not be enabled by artificial intelligence.
“It’s quite disheartening as to what the median film literacy is out there,” says Saxon, who has confirmed that his film is AI-free, created instead with a mixture of puppetry, animatronics, practical special effects and digital VFX.
“Even before AI, people kind of treated CG as if it was AI. Like ‘computer generated’ – you simply ask the computer to make images for you, right? But CG is a bespoke art that’s complicated and full of people who pour their hearts and souls into it. It’s frustrating to work seven years on a film with the goal of trying to break people’s brains – to create an image that you can’t fathom how exactly it was made. But instead of breaking people’s brains, they just went, ‘Oh, that’s AI.’”
The phony AI discourse ended up being the least of Saxon’s concerns, though. Just as he was set to premiere Ochi at the Sundance Film Festival this past January, his Altadena, Calif., home was destroyed in the wildfires.
“Oh man, it was not a good time. I went into Sundance pretty nervous and destabilized. But now, I’ve been able to show it to friends and family in L.A. and see the movie through their eyes,” Saxon says. “Now, I’m dancing through this.”
So much so that he might even have time to sneak in a screening of Gremlins.
The Legend of Ochi opens in select theatres April 25.
