Blueprint

 Chaos was sacred, a notion to be respected and nourished, one of the principles, at least to my imagination, of the production that unfolded – full of life, risk and trust, at the mercy of the weather... There was, from Athina and producer Rebecca O’Brien, an extraordinary dedication to the experience of the film, not only the film itself... Barley, rye and flax were planted to be harvested on film; local farmers taught actors to reap and plough; crafts people shared their understanding of spinning and weaving.

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Jim Crace’s use of language is at the same time surgical and intangible – I felt like I was not going to do it justice unless I comprehended the exact use and layering of each word. His world has no specific place, no specific time, the language itself is trance-inducing. If you start asking too specific questions, the text resists.

understanding the central character, Walt, who is a weak man. How do you spend an entire film disliking the protagonist, yet sympathising with him? I felt it was in the rhythm. Slow, quiet, mundane, frustrating even – and then suddenly, a burst of action, a flash of recognition. And then back to sleepwalking. 

My films don’t follow strict arcs or beats, and Joslyn and I were very much in synchronicity, in that respect. We knew that this was going to be a film about people who do nothing. 

We are condemned or condemning ourselves to be inert witnesses to history. It’s the beginning of the end of the heroic involvement with history. 

We never did the same thing. I did not have a predetermined idea of what a scene was going to be. I wanted to let it develop freely amongst the cast. 

part of the code was that we were going to embrace anarchy. We were not improvising action on set, but there was a sense of improvisation in the way we recorded what was going on, instead of shooting it. Sean is a great cinématographe or camera-dancer, as you know. There was an intent by all of us to live inside it, instead of standing across from it,

The film doesn’t take a thesis on morality. It’s just looking at the situation of a community being taken apart. There is a certain tenderness towards everyone, even toward (the villain)

maybe you have this optimistic sense of the film because there was a whole community that came together to make a film about a community being dismantled. There’s an oxymoron in the way we made the film and what the film is ultimately about.

Every time I make a film there’s a very close relationship to space. Space may be the most important character in my films. I don’t think Harvest could have been made without communing with the land... There was a ritualistic gesture in searching for and finding the barley and flax heirloom seeds, sowing them and then harvesting. 

Nicolas (Becker) was already working on the sound design as if it was a score. That was something that we discussed from the very beginning. It was like a symphony that nature was performing. He had come to location and had set up his 360° mics, had used his contact mics to record the ground itself, the bugs and the birds. It was becoming a music score unto itself. And we talked about mixing that with electronic sound,

And with the costumes, we had the idea of the wrap, a universal dress for peasants all over the world. Each villager could make it their own by the way it was folded around their body. Kirsty and her team made all these great accessories by hand. The fabrics were dyed by hand with local plant dyes. They used wool, cotton and linen from Scotland. The process of dressing included laying each actor on the floor and wrapping them, like babies. There was something ritualistic to it