An Indie's 8-Year Saga to Getting Made
Isaiah Saxon and Evan Prosofsky on what it took for an A24 greenlight on fantasy kids' movie 'The Legend of Ochi'
If you’re looking at the weekend box office as a choice between the auteur-driven ambition of Sinners and the kid-friendly spectacle of A Minecraft Movie, may I suggest something that actually offers you both? Opening in theaters wide this weekend, A24’s The Legend of Ochi is a deliberately old-fashioned kids’ adventure movie, full of fantastical sights, thrilling action and an extremely cute animal creature you can already buy as a keychain.
Any original movie for children is a marvel in our IP-driven era, much more so one that’s so clearly a passion project. (The Oscar-winning animated feature Flow was treated as a revelation for exactly that reason.) So I was thrilled to talk to the film’s director Isaiah Saxon and cinematographer Evan Prosofsky about their work together on the $10 million film, shot on location in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania and using some extremely clever cost-saving digital effects that don’t look the least bit digital at all.
It turns out that creating all that effortless magic onscreen required a lot of effort behind the scenes, from Saxon’s dogged commitment to getting the movie made to Prosofsky making the most of the limited sets they could afford to build. They opened up to me about all of it, and why — despite the grim omens for indie films everywhere, including in their own households — they’re already at work on their next big, ambitious efforts.
‘A Shoestring Budget Fantasy Adventure’
Saxon will gladly tell you about the good parts, like standing on the side of a jagged mountain in Europe and calling “action,” or watching the animatronic puppets at the heart of his debut feature film come to life. But the director of The Legend of Ochi, which premiered at Sundance in January, is also honest about what it takes to make the kind of movie the industry really, really doesn’t make anymore: “It was really lonely and painful and isolating to be making a shoestring budget fantasy adventure movie.”
Set on a fictional island in the Black Sea and following the adventures of a young girl (Helena Zengel) and the tiny forest creature in her care, The Legend of Ochi is a throwback in so many ways, from its fable-like narrative to the analog effects that bring the mythical Ochi creatures to life. But it’s also very much the product of our modern age, from the years-long struggle it took to get this independent film made to the hundreds of digital effects deployed to make the film look like it didn’t use digital effects at all.
Saxon learned the hard way — developing multiple movies that eventually fell apart — that he had to have a rock-solid pitch in place to get Ochi made. When he first started seriously developing the idea around 2017, he says, “I was doing all I could to make this an undeniable financeable thing.” He developed concept art that still looks a lot like the final product. “It looks a lot like the movie because I needed it to it to be like, ‘Yeah, what if that moved?’”
Eventually Saxon brought that pitch deck to Prosofsky, who like Saxon had gotten his start working on music videos; Saxon directed videos for Björk and Grizzly Bear, while Prosofsky was the cinematographer for videos from Grimes and Lorde, among others. “It just absolutely blew my mind,” Prosofsky says of that early Legend of Ochi concept art. “Everything about it was so inspiring, and it was really clear how much thought and love he put into it.”
Both Saxon and Prosofsky eventually learned that, in Hollywood, there is something even more powerful than a really excellent pitch deck: movie stars. “Nobody tells you this, but the minute that actors say ‘Yes,’ the movie is going,” says Saxon. “Here I was spending years proving out creature prototypes and going to Romania and shooting location footage and doing all this concept art, and still just get everyone saying no. Every studio saying no. And then the moment that a marquee actor said yes, we were greenlit like 72 hours later.”
That marquee actor was Cate Blanchett, who later was prevented by scheduling conflicts from actually being in the movie; her role was eventually played by Emily Watson. But it was Blanchett’s participation that got A24 to say yes, and then Willem Dafoe coming on board allowed the boulder to continue speeding down the hill, with The Legend of Ochi going into production in Romania in the fall of 2021.
It was a journey getting there, but Prosofsky emphasizes that once the green light came, “it was [Saxon’s] movie through and through. I mean, obviously we had a lot of challenges, but it was Isaiah’s movie for sure.” Saxon — granted, he was speaking from inside A24’s offices — concurs. “They wanted to see dailies, but we didn’t even get a script note,” he says. “We had no adult supervision, for better or worse.”
‘A Gun to Our Head’
Playing at under 90 minutes and with just four main actors — Zengel, Dafoe and Watson are joined by Finn Wolfhard as our heroine Yuri’s brother — The Legend of Ochi sounds, on the surface, like Saxon’s ideal “undeniable, financeable thing.” But it doesn’t take long to see that Saxon failed, in his own words, to keep his children’s adventure movie small.
The real Carpathian Mountains make for a pretty epic background, but so do the still backdrops, inserted digitally, that create the same effect as some of the famous matte paintings of classic Hollywood.
The world of Ochi is a captivating mix of old and new, with Dafoe’s father character driving a truck while wearing medieval armor, or a vending machine parked outside a ramshackle barn. It’s so convincing you feel like Saxon and Prosofsky simply set up their cameras inside some forgotten kingdom, but of course, movie magic is never as simple as that.
“We were there in a remote Carpathian village with Willem Dafoe and animatronic creatures and people in ape suits, with all the toys and all the challenge and adventure that filmmaking promised us as young people. It was all that,” says Saxon. “But then it was also a gun to our head with a really short, tight schedule. The first half of the film was all shot on location, then we go to stages in Bucharest in the middle of winter, in which we can only afford to build the sections of the set that are what the actors are physically contacting. And we’re going to have to all imagine what everything else is.”
One set that allowed them to really go for it was the brightly colored grocery store where Yuri and the Ochi stop for a supply raid. In addition to drawing inspiration from more traditional vintage fantasy films like Kes and E.T., Saxon was inspired by Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, and its depiction of the world as a “live action cartoon.” For Prosofsky, the grocery store sequence was “a license to be a little bit more bold” with the film’s look. And even that required some low-budget trickery.
“Isaiah had some really creative ideas with how we could, again, using matte paintings, extend our very humble grocery store set and make it into this really epic world,” says Prosofsky. Saxon puts it more plainly: “We did shoot an abandoned office building that we could only afford to build just the foreground, and then we’re putting in 3D environments to complete them.”
A24 and Neon: ‘Sun on a Barren Planet’
Having endured the shoestring budget, the Romanian winter, and the glacial pace of independent film development, Saxon and Prosofsky still remain undaunted — they’re both at work on their next film projects, with Prosofsky calling from the set of Grand Prairie, a feature he’s directing with support from Telefilm Canada. But when I ask what’s making them feel optimistic about the future of film careers like theirs, they both balk.
“Oh my God, you’re asking the wrong guy,” Prosofsky says with a laugh. “Like, God bless Canada. Even that took me 10 years of paying for the movie myself to convince them to greenlight it. I had to jump through a lot of hoops and quite frankly, lie through my teeth about the budget to get the financing plan approved.”
Prosofsky’s wife, Emily Kai Bock, meanwhile, has been struggling to find financing for her own film, for which Saxon’s wife, Meara O’Reilly, is composing the music. “It’s an undeniable package, and with films like that not moving forward, it’s hard to be optimistic,” says Saxon. “For every friend I have that has made a movie and had a break, like Dean Fleischer-Camp and the Daniels, here’s 15 friends who are so talented and brilliant and are spinning on their third script that’s not getting made. We’re in a really shitty time for independent film, and for as bright a light as A24 and Neon are, they’re like the sun on a barren planet.”
Saxon is planning his next project, a film set in modern-day Las Vegas that he describes as “a crime movie and a dance movie and a romance movie.” He was inspired by the dialogue-heavy scenes in The Legend of Ochi between Dafoe and Watson, what he calls “the magic of the greatest actors in the world saying your words and just delivering.”
Making The Legend of Ochi, Saxon says, was “so painful and challenging, and I’m trying to learn from it.” And, like a fantasy movie hero pushing forward against all odds, he’s ready to step behind the camera and try again.
