RUST AND BONE

Director's Statement

There is something gripping about Craig Davidson’s short story collection “Rust and Bone”, a depiction of a dodgy, modern world in which individual lives and simple destinies are blown out of all proportion by drama and accident. They offer a vision of the United States as a rational universe in which the individual needs to fight to find its place and to escape what fate has in store for it. Ali and Stephanie, our two characters, do not appear in the short stories, and Craig Davidson’s collection already seems to belong to the pre-history of the project, but the power and brutality of the tale, our desire to use drama, indeed melodrama, to magnify their characters, all have their immediate source in those stories. From the very beginning of our adaptation work, we were focused on a kind of cinematography that, for want of a better word, we called ‘expressionist”. We wanted the power of stark, brutal and contrasting images in order to further the melodrama: the aesthetics of the Great Depression, of county-fair films whose bizarre visual work sublimates the dark reality of a world in which God “vomits the lukewarm”. It is that kind of aesthetic that constantly guided us as we worked on the screenplay. It sustains a love story that is the true hero of the film. It shows the world through the eyes of a confused child. It underscores the nobleness of our characters in a world made violent by economic disaster. And it respects Ali and Stephanie’s stubborn attempts to escape their condition.