Disappearances Director Embraces Roots

(Above [L-R]: Rat (William Sanderson), Wild Bill (Charlie McDermott) and Quebec Bill (Kris Kristofferson))

Jay Craven isn’t the first director to fall in love with his setting. Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen have New York City; Barry Levinson has Baltimore. And Craven has rural Vermont—the location of his latest film, Disappearances, which premiers in the state in March with national distribution soon to follow.

St. Johnsbury, Vt., is barely a speck on the map, but Craven didn’t need a scout to find it. His house and his production company, Kingdom County, are both a short drive away. Director’s chair nestled in the mud after a day’s worth of cold rain, his crew setting up lights in the pitch black just shy of midnight next to a freezing lake, Craven seems right at home.

“Seventy percent of the film is shot within three miles of my house,” he says, crickets almost thundering in the background. “That’s nice. But they’re places that speak to me and mean a lot in terms of what I think their natural beauty is, how they can resonate, and also locations where you can get five good setups, five good scenes, within a hundred yards of each other. Just by turning a different direction, you get a new environment.”

Disappearances is the final installment of a trilogy based on the books of Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher. “I’ve been living in this region for 30 years,” he says. “These are characters and stories from this region. That’s why they interest me. They’re a little bit like Westerns, and I sort of like them for that reason. They’re a little bit about outlaws, and refusing to give in to contemporary norms. The characters are larger than life.”

Mark Twain adventure with a dash of violent slapstick a la Monty Python, Mosher’s Disappearances is a drama and a comedy. It’s an epic work in physical and emotional terms, following Quebec Bill Bonhomme, a good-natured dreamer, as he returns to his former trade as a whiskey runner to save his farm, bringing his somewhat reserved son along with him. Deciding how to pare down the story to a feature-length film wasn’t an easy task. “I think in any novel, that’s the challenge,” says Craven. “It’s a question of how you find the essential part of the story.”

Vermont might not radiate the same indie cool as Kevin Smith’s New Jersey or its more urban counterparts, but Craven’s operation is still rooted in the independent-film tradition. Disappearances was shot for just under two-million dollars, mostly from individual investors. That’s more than many, but still a far cry from the lowest Hollywood budgets. All the actors, including the bigger-name talent—Kris Kristofferson, Luis Guzmán and Gary Farmer—committed to minimum union scale to be in the film. Of Craven’s 80-person crew, 15 were his film students at local Marlboro College.

Craven says he’s working in a cultural vein, as opposed to a commercial one, and this requires a different approach. It means a commitment to remain entrenched in place and character in terms of story, and in terms of production, “to dig very deep roots in the region, to play very deep in the region beyond the infrastructure of movie theaters, to understand our audience and try to reach it directly. Where the industry intersects with us, great.”