Interview: Isaiah Saxon on Empowering Children with ‘The Legend of Ochi’

In a 2009 Esquire feature titled “These Are the Directors of the Future,” a young Isaiah Saxon laid out a 30-year plan for his filmmaking collective Encyclopedia Pictura. Included in the design was the construction of a community called Trout Gulch, a handcrafted spin on Disney World that would serve as a “mythological and magically inspiring place that isn’t synthetic and fake, built with living things and populated with real people.” The mellower Saxon of today laughs off the quote as “a very naïve, stoned, 25-year-old talking.”

Trout Gulch only lasted for three years as a physical place. But shortly over halfway into the long-term vision Saxon articulated, he’s now achieved the same effect on screen in The Legend of Ochi. His feature-length directorial debut is full of tactile craftsmanship that helps imbue a spirit of authenticity to the story he unfolds in a fictional village in the Carpathian Mountains.

The sensitive teenager Yuri (Helena Zengel), estranged from her remote mother (Emily Watson) and alienated from her militaristic father (Willem Dafoe), embarks on a treacherous mission across a mystical landscape to return a lost Ochi to its home. As she draws nearer to their dwelling, Yuri’s emotional connection to the primate feels as tangible as her physical one. Saxon’s creature feature-cum-coming-of-age tale pays respects to its forebearers not merely by giving clever nods to the genre’s greats. In tandem with a team of talented craftspeople, he triumphantly brings to life an original mythology from his imagination.

I sat down with Saxon at A24’s offices as The Legend of Ochi opened in theaters. Our conversation covered how the Ochi’s signature squawk came to be, where he drew inspiration for the film’s humor, and what he thinks about the relationship between technology and nature.

How did you get your actors to buy into the fantasy world of the film? Were you sharing all the details you had accumulated in your head about it?

So much of it was evident in the material I sent Willem, Emily, Helena, and Finn [Wolfhard, who plays Yuri’s adopted brother Petro] to get them to all say yes within 48 hours. It was years of concept art I’d created that looked like the finished film, and then the script itself, which is very clear. With the little development money I’d gotten, I was traveling to Romania, shooting all the locations, developing prototypes of the creatures with John Nolan Studios in London, and proving out all these elements so that there was this package of, “This is the movie, this is the world.” It was crystal clear what they were signing onto. And then when you land in Transylvania, you look around and there’s no “this is what it’s gonna be.” It is!

As a first-time feature filmmaker, how do you give direction to actors like Willem Dafoe and Emily Watson and guide their wild performances without being cowed?

If I’ve written every detail that I want to see, it all has emotional clarity and sense to it, and I’ve cast the one person in the world who can do that. The version of Willem and Emily I can conjure wrote these words for me, knowing their superpowers. Willem can waffle between devastatingly severe, terrifying, adorable, vulnerable, and cute. And he can do that from one moment to the next like no one else. I’m gonna write to that. Ninety percent of it is setting all that up, and then when you’re there, hopefully, you’re just a good dad being mindful of the environment. It’s hard to create a good environment for people in these conditions. These were probably the hardest shooting conditions Willem had been in in many years. It was extremely challenging.

You call yourself a filmmaker and not just a director. How do all those other functions you touch complement the directing role?

My route to filmmaking was as a kid drawing pictures. That’s all I ever did that I was good at. That turned into sculpting and building things. Once I’d filmed the things I built, [I was] doing more drawings in post-production to build out the world. It’s an organic approach that’s thrilling to me, making stuff with my hands. I’m driven by my own interest in fun, but then what that ends up also turning into is a whole style of filmmaking that’s environmental storytelling and the power of pictures and music, more than just presenting theater.

Is part of learning the role of the director turning more individually initiated pursuits into a true collaboration?

Absolutely. A lot of this artwork I’m producing is just to convince the actual best people in the world to join the project. John Nolan, whose studio built all the creatures, had just done Jurassic World, and here I come with a little $10 million movie with a $1 million creature budget. He’s going to take his team, who are operating at the highest level, and fit within this narrow target. It helps to be able to draw exactly what I want, to know and have worked with puppets for years, and to be a part of their team to service their genius. That gives you a leg up rather than just being a director who’s like, “I don’t know, there’s a creature. You tell me what it looks like and does, and I’ll tell you if I like it.” That’s not my approach.

I think the language and the musicality of the Ochi are as important as their look. Given that it’s such a thematic part of their species, how did you come up with the distinct sound that they have in the film?

I knew I wanted a believable animal language, something that rhymed with birdsong or dolphin language. But it needed to be produced by a primate. So I looked to human sounds to see what humans could produce that might help us. As I was searching for the term “throat whistling” on YouTube, I stumbled upon a video of a guy named Paul “The Birdman” Manalatos. He only had one video, and he was just chilling with a webcam in his basement like, “Hey guys, I have this sound I can make that sounds like a bird, check it out.” He opens his mouth and makes the sound of the Ochi. I even have the audio from that YouTube video in the film. I then reached out to him, sent him the script, and he was like, “Oh my god, this is my life story. My mom was out of the picture. I turned to black metal and throat whistling to express myself. This is incredible.”

We brought him into the studio, recorded the whole script with him just like any other actor, and got his interpretation through throat whistling of each little emotional beat. He’s the voice of all the Ochi, and then I just tweaked it a little bit with mockingbird, whale, and raven samples to create the sound. We also needed it to become musical, and that’s where I worked with my wife, Meara O’Reilly, a composer who works with this musical form called hocketing where you take a melody and split it across two voices. It’s syncopated and disorienting. I wanted to do that with these throat-whistled sounds, and she managed to create that climactic musical moment.

You’ve spoken at length about where you drew inspiration for the adventure and action elements of the film. Where were you looking for the humor in the film?

The big formational creature feature for me when I was a kid is Nicholas Roeg’s The Witches, which I think is the most faithful adaptation of Roald Dahl’s tone and allegiance to the moral superiority of kids and the insane absurdity of adults. Dahl’s humor in general was always a north star. The other touch point for humor is the work of the Coen brothers and their more live-action cartoon work like Raising Arizona. I hope that there’s resonance there with the approach to the tone of the comedy. There’s also the comedy of Paul Thomas Anderson, which is a comedy that’s played completely straight. The humor comes out of the psychology of the writing. You might even miss that it was funny. You watch Phantom Thread for the first time, and you’re just silent and gripped. Then, you watch it the second time, and it’s a barn-burner.

I went to a screening of There Will Be Blood a few years ago, which I had never seen in a theater, and I had no idea it was so funny! People might have gone a little far in thinking every Daniel Plainview line was campy though.

It’s so funny, but it’s not even about the camp. You know that the writer is in on the absurdity of this man’s psychology and how small he is as a person. The first time you see it, you’re scared of him. The second time, you see through his games, and now it’s funny. That’s what I wanted with Willem Dafoe’s character, someone who was all bluster, and maybe he’s terrifying, but he’s also so small inside that you can’t help but laugh at him.

You’ve said that if you were planning a perfect dinner, Mr. Rogers would be one of the three people you’d invite. Was he at all an inspiration given that he was one of the first people, at least in popular culture, to take children seriously as people?

One hundred percent! I forgot I’d ever said that, but that’s great. There’s a thing where adults become so entrenched with their perspective, stories, and justifications for their life that they don’t see reality anymore. Kids are coming in fresh, and they’re open-minded and curious. They might not have all the knowledge yet, but they’re actually alert to reality sometimes. Of course, they have no power, so they don’t get to choose what they want to do. This movie is trying to demonstrate that kids need to just assert themselves, break free, be courageous, and follow their gut, nose, and instinct…and adults need to get out of the way.

Across your various endeavors, I see two roads: one driving toward technological innovation and the other toward the majesty of the natural world. Do you see these as parallel or diverging tracks?

I think I’ll take a cue from Björk here because I feel like that’s central to her career path as well. As we’ve talked about it together, she sees technology as an outcropping of nature. This is all a project of life. We’ve developed all of this stuff, but technology is like a little outgrowth of life itself. It’s a component of nature. The built world is actually the natural world now; it’s not some actually separate category. Why am I attracted to both? I guess I’m pursuing learning and curiosity, so both of these areas are just ways of always discovering.

Not to open the A.I. can of worms, but when the trailer for this film came out, there were legions of people online who just couldn’t fathom that this film could possibly be handmade. Do you still think of this technology as part of nature given that it derives from a computer’s brain?

A.I. is still nature. I’ve always philosophically felt like we should take an approach to technology that looks at the effect of the technology on the human body. If you look at someone engaging with a great technology, you might see a very alive person who’s excited and engaged—even physically. If you look at a technology that I think might be diminishing the aliveness of the person or even the animal, then I would say let’s throw that technology away. All of the art crafts that I practice are technologies. Everything’s a technology.

But I’m about following what’s fun. Drawing, sculpting, building stuff in the mountains, doing matte paintings, compositing, making 3D [animation] in the computer, doing bespoke CG stuff—all of this is fun, interesting, and engages me as a person. A.I., at least with its present set of tools, is a fascinating curiosity. It feels a little like a slot machine that has its own fun to it, but it’s not comparable to the fun I’m getting from all these other crafts. It’s less about [it being] an anti-technological progress or Luddite position and more of an appropriate technology position.

Is the distinction, then, that it’s appropriate if you use the technology to create rather than just using it to consume?

But A.I. comes over the fence now into creation. If I were 12 and I had Midjourney versus going to drawing class, maybe I’m just gonna do Midjourney for the same reason I played a lot of video games. I would use the level builder in Tony Hawk for five hours a day because it’s just fascinating. You’re gonna follow your curiosity. I’m sure that A.I. is gonna be approached that way for new generations of kids, but my skepticism about it is this: Just how much is it really taking of you to make it? A lot of what we’ve seen in A.I. so far is people who’d rather have done the work and be at the end of the process than people who want to do the work. But the doing is where everything is. It’s not in having done.

If young viewers use The Legend of Ochi as a touchstone for their own work, what art do you hope this spawns for them?

In terms of the art that I would ever seek to inspire, it’s just to give people permission to be themselves and make weird, ambitious work. That’s what I needed. I needed to see someone giving me permission because it’s hard to blaze paths. I’m trying to follow the paths of my heroes: Miyazaki, Paul Thomas Anderson, and filmmakers who showed me what was possible.

But to kids outside of art, I hope that this inspires a sense that they should trust their intuition, gut, and nose. Don’t listen to your parents; go do what you want to do. They’ll figure it out and have to get on board eventually. Don’t let anyone put you in the corner. Go forth.