Ahead of the release of The Wolves Always Come at Night, we sat down with director Gabrielle Brady to discuss her hybrid approach, the realities of shooting in rural Mongolia and how she collaborated Davaa and Zaya, co-writers and protagonists of the film.
What drew you to Mongolia in the first place, and to Daava and Zaya’s story more specifically?
It spans back quite a time. In my early 20s, I left Australia to take a volunteer position as a TV producer at the national Mongolian broadcaster, where I lived for around 18 months. It was a kids’ show, with a Mongolian co-host and co-producer, to highlight stories about Mongolian teenagers in an English-learning format. During this time, we would travel and spend time in a lot of small villages and often stay with nomadic families. Of course, being so young, this had a very profound effect on me.
In the years after I returned quite a few times to Mongolian to spend time with friends and colleagues. I was also visiting some of the families I had stayed with in my younger years and finding that a lot of people were not living on their lands anymore, but had moved into the cities ger districts. It was here I started listening to the many stories of people’s transition from the countryside to the districts, and all the confusion, uncertainty and grief that was being felt.
With Daava and Zaya, this was an entirely different meeting! By the time I met them, I was already working with the film’s lead Researcher Dorjpagma Pagma and the Producer Ariunaa Tserinpil. Dorjpagma had been visiting the cities ger districts every weekend over a space of a couple of years, meeting people and hearing stories until she finally met Daava and Zaya. When I met them there were several things that struck me. First, it was clear within about two minutes that we were being interviewed by them to see if we were up to the mark in making their story. The second thing was that Daava shared with me the experience he had felt in hearing his horse at night and the belief that inexplicably, the horse had somehow found him. The third was that Daava invited us to start shooting the next day.
Ultimately, we both wanted to work together to create something special and unique to this collective experience of what Mongolian nomadic communities are facing.
The Wolves Always Come at Night combines documentary and fiction scenes, with Daava and Zaya credited as co-writers. Could you talk about this hybrid approach, and how the writing process worked?
Daava made it clear when we first met that if we were to make the film we needed to show life “as it was” for him and Zaya before they lost the animals so that people could more closely understand their loss. They had expressed that in the city it was easy for them to be overlooked and invisibilised… their past life and everything it held had become like a distant dream. So it was important for them that the film be their witness to their identity as herders.
That invitation for me was the main impetus for ‘filming in retrospect’; filming after the event of something having happened. Another reason was that there was never any way that we wanted to approach the film by being with a family at the very moment when they are losing their animals, which would most likely cause more harm.
For me it’s a very big theme that I could discuss for hours. The hybridity of the film meant a lot of things. It means we could offer some distance for Daava and Zaya to find an expression of this life-altering event, in a way where they are part of the creative approach. It also meant we could create a very collaborative environment where we could become co-writers of the film.
For us this meant daily conversations, where we were scripting ideas on the go. Before we started filming we would have long conversations into the night, where we would etch out the ideas for the film; which parts of the experience we would show and how; which scenes would be more observational and which moments would be more constructed and how. From this, we were in a daily dialogue about the scenes we were filming.
The film is so beautifully shot – did you and your cinematographer, Michael Latham, have any visual references in mind while shooting?
Michael is a very special cinematographer in that he can really dance between documentary and fiction. He can chase goats being born, in totally uncontrollable situations; as he can craft very beautifully executed sequences that are highly controlled. We definitely had very little control on almost the entire shoot though! Even the karaoke scene was filmed within a couple of takes. Sometimes it felt like trying to make a narrative with a documentary-sized team and budget. But I think that is the very nuanced way of hybrid films and being ‘in between’.
We did watch a lot of references before the shoot. More formative references were the work of Carlos Reygadas… and visually Terrence Malick. But there was no one seminal reference film for us. We wanted to deviate from films we had seen shot in the area before – which tended to be more static and wide, with people small against the landscape. Instead we wanted a hand-held, fresh and close approach, centring Daava and Zaya (and the non-human characters of the stallion and landscape) and to feel inside their experience. We wanted to capture the aliveness that ‘anything could happen’. And to feel a sense of growing tension. Night was important. The moment before sleep was important. And above all, the intimacy of Daava and Zaya – to each other, to their family, and of course to their animals. To really be with them and their point of view. To capture more of their inner world.
The Wolves Always Come at Night shows from Friday 3 January.
