Director Julian Higgins Means Business
His film, GOD'S COUNTRY, is now streaming on Hulu
Picture a stereotypical, capital-G “Great” movie director in your head. Maybe recency bias has you thinking it’s someone like Christopher Nolan (or perhaps Greta Gerwig), but it’s safe to say this person is exacting, precise, and widely lauded as a visionary.
Since roughly the 1960s, some version of the auteur theory positing the director as the primary author of a film has served as a predominant mode in analyzing and categorizing film. I’m not immune from this taxonomy myself, having devoted entire newsletters to the signatures of Nicole Holofcener, Sofia Coppola, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Martin Scorsese … just this summer! But it can be lazy at worst, limiting at best to understanding how a movie actually gets made.
Film is — say it with me — a collaborative medium. Seeing them as the product of just one mind may have saved movies from the dustbin of cultural miscellanea in the 20th century, but this ideological framework may inadvertently be leading us to devalue just how many people’s cooperation and participation it takes to create art today. (More on that in a bit, I promise.)
It’s become somewhat of a personal preoccupation, likely in line with my own professional transition into a more managerial role, to understand the way a director conducts a set and coordinates creatives to achieve a shared artistic goal. I think we as people — and I’d argue this goes doubly so for aspiring artists — have a lot more to learn from people like Julian Higgins who see through the trappings of the role’s tendency to self-mythologize. He should know better than most given that he teaches a seminar on the business of directing and states that he finds “a big part of the class for me is demystifying the profession.”
“The mystique of directing is really unhelpful,” Higgins told me over Zoom last month, “and it's very seductive.” We’re talking because his debut feature God’s Country, which premiered to rave reviews at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, is now hitting Hulu. I have refrained from vocalizing support more formally given my conflict of interest with the film’s producer, Halee Bernard, who is a dear friend1.
But I feel confident even without knowing someone involved in the production, I’d still be emphatically recommending this movie to you. This neo-Western starring Thandiwe Newton as a Montanan professor trying to hold her own as a Black woman against an unforgiving natural and cultural landscape is sparse and scintillating in equal measure. It’s the kind of thing I think we’ll reevaluate on in the future as a prime representation of this time in America given the way it refracts political anxieties without blaring its analysis at the top of its lungs.
A literal slide show of interrelated images of the country’s history offered without commentary opens the film, which makes for the perfect entry point into an environment that trusts the viewer can connect the dots to see the full picture. That’s the challenge of God’s Country, Higgins expresses, “To dramatize these dynamics in ways that make them very visible and understandable but without feeling preachy, on the nose, too black-and-white, too easy.” He dramatizes without polemicizing in a way that trusts the audience’s intelligence. It’s invigorating, and I hope you’ll see for yourself rather than letting either of us talk at you (one decidedly more interesting than the other).
But I’m a little less interested in just talking about God’s Country itself with the time he graciously offers me. It’s not that I didn’t want to dig into this meaty work — just that in 18 months or so of press, you can scour the web for interviews that ask just about every question that you want answered. What interests me is cinema at large and the very wonder of its creation — and if we knew that it was methodical work rather than just the miraculous translation of a single person’s vision, perhaps we’d feel more inclined to appreciate and compensate it accordingly.
“I didn't have a movie that I saw that made me want to be a director or a cinemagoing experience where suddenly I realized I could see my name in lights,” Higgins admits early on in our conversation. “It really was a process of listening to what I was interested in over the years and that leading me forward.”
His path to the director’s chair is neither typical nor atypical — just the natural culmination of a number of interests. Higgins’ exploration of the arts began through his pursuit of acting but clicked into a new register when he picked up a video camera in the seventh grade and had to ask himself: “Where should I put this? What does the camera do that an audience member in a theater doesn't get to do?”
“The main focus for me is working with the actors and moving the camera around in space,” he acknowledged. No reasonable person would look at God’s Country and say Higgins has no sense for visual storytelling, but he’s clear that technology and equipment are secondary concerns to him. That’s why he works with trusted partners like Andrew Wheeler, the film’s director of photography, who has shot eight projects with Higgins over 12 years. “I don't have a perfect ‘version’ in my head that I'm trying to guide the thing towards,” Higgins volunteers. “My model is trying to discover what it is with the people I'm working with as we're doing it.”
Higgins clarifies during our conversation that he’s not giving away his role in the process by leaning heavily on crew members like Wheeler. But the way he describes their work illustrates that these people are not just on set to execute his vision. “I write a script as a starting point for conversations with people like actors, production designers, producers, cinematographers, and composers,” Higgins offers. He actively solicits their opinions on top of the strong ones he brings to a project because, ideally, “it would be really cool if we got something better than what I had in mind.”
It’s a missed opportunity, in Higgins’ mind, to project an air of infallibility into his artistry. “I don't subscribe to authoritarianism, so why would I in filmmaking?” he posits. “The desire to collaborate, to me, goes with my politics.” Though he’s sure to couch this story in his admiration of Stanley Kubrick’s work, he provides the example of his record-breaking take count working with Shelley Duvall on The Shining. “This is a world of extreme privilege and unadulterated god complex that I don't subscribe to,” he says while lamenting how the exacting process made Duvall later made quit acting altogether. “You're telling me that take 173 was the first usable take?”
But it’s one thing to hold these lofty ideals in concept — and another thing to put them into action in the fast-paced environment of an independent film set operating with little time and less money. I ask Higgins not just what he sees the role of director to be but how he operationalizes it. I’m curious about specific tactics and the tangible result that has on the finished product … which he is, of course, more than capable of providing in our discussion.
“There is this deference to directors where if the director just comes out and says, ‘This is what I have in mind,’” Higgins notes, “that's what people are going to try to do.” So how does he avoid groupthink? Speaking to the collaborative process with DP Andrew Wheeler, he’s learned “I need to hear what his idea is first before I share my idea.” It’s in small but powerful gestures like these, or in Greta Gerwig making her crew all wear name tags to create a warmer environment on set, where I think you actually see the gears of cinema grinding.
This need to lead by example comes up again later when we get to talking about safety on set in the context of the strikes. “I can say if you see anything unsafe to come talk to me, but unless I acknowledge such that that's hard for someone to do when they're being paid just pennies as a PA, are they going to come up to the director and producer and say, ‘This is not cool?’” he suggests. “This is literally how people get hurt and killed on film sets. You have to acknowledge that reality if you're going to be believed […] I take that responsibility. That was me on God's Country, and I'm proud of that.”
Thankfully, he didn’t have any major flare-ups of this kind on the set or in the production (or, at least, none that he was willing to express on the record). “You start understanding more and more about what you're doing as you go through the process,” Higgins claims, “and when you bring in other people, their instincts start to develop, and you develop shared instincts.”
A more telling example might come from how a key moment in the film came together between Thandiwe Newton’s Sandra and Jeremy Bobb’s local sheriff Wolf. “I'm always a little nervous about the big scene that gets a little extra attention that sometimes you don't need,” Higgins confessed regarding this centerpiece sequence in God’s Country. “The whole scene, essentially, once they're in it is a close-up of her and a close-up of him. This is very simple: two singles.”
“We did her side of it first,” he continued, “and in take one and take two of this very emotional scene, she was quite emotional. It makes sense to me, as a director, why that actor would come to the scene knowing this is a big scene and wanting to serve the story.” But Higgins sensed the need to recalibrate the scene to make it work better. Headed into the third take, his thought for Newton was: “What if we try just simply delivering the information to him? You don't need to make it do anything. Just simply tell him what happened.”
“Once when she was released from needing to help the scene at all,” he observed, “it naturally got very emotional for her in a way that she really felt more. That entire take is in the movie, that's the one that we used. And it was so different from the first two because there was no acting required on her part. She just had to look at him, see how these things were landing with him, and continue on.”
The construction of that scene feels illustrative of Higgins’ process at large. “I like the discipline of setting things up with the actors on set very mindfully so that we start getting really interesting, raw, perhaps somewhat messy material on the first take,” he describes his process of working with actors. Some of this is just born out of necessity: an indie budget doesn’t provide the luxury enjoyed by David Fincher to do 99 attempts of a scene over multiple days.
But it also seems entirely in keeping with Higgins’ overall artistic philosophy of trusting that his esteemed partners will arrive at a shared understanding of the best way to realize a moment. “Assembling the team is the most important part of the process,” he observes, “and if you take really good care of the process, you'll be happy with the result.”
This element of the job is what ends up interesting me the most — how you can know you got what you need, especially if you didn’t show up to set with a clear vision of how it needed to be done. “It's a holistic experience to try to be creative in an expensive, fast-tracked structure,” he divulges. “On a film, you don't have a lot of luxury time to make slow, careful decisions. What does that mean? You have to be really attentive to what's going on in your brain.”
(A brief aside for some of the neurodivergent friends who I know read this newsletter: “I also just want to mention,” Higgins then interjects, “I have ADHD! It's been fascinating to pay attention to how my ADHD brain interacts with the filmmaking process.” When I ask just how, he mentions hyperfocus giving him the ability to “retain all kinds of very detailed, specific thoughts for long periods of time,” and it’s this overall self-knowledge that helps him squeeze more insight out of the filmmaking process.)
The making of the below scene, featuring Newton’s Sandra in a heated dispute with her department chair played by Kai Lennox, demonstrates how Higgins can arrive at this moment of enlightenment. “We did maybe four takes of it,” he describes, “and the fourth one was the breakthrough take where it was just so obvious that was as good as the scene was ever going to be. That's the take that is the scene.”
“At the end of that take,” Higgins recounts, “Thandiwe's crying, Kai is crying, I'm crying, the writer's crying, the makeup artist is crying, the boom operator's crying ... everyone knows. There's no confusion about it. The group dynamic is extremely important because if you have one person there who's like, ‘I don't give a shit what we're doing,’ then you don't get as much information and opportunity, you don't get the good ideas.”
This wasn’t always as cut-and-dry in the making of God’s Country, though, and it did require following intuition in a different way. “In the edit, you're looking back and seeing like how your decisions played out and trying to make it all make sense,” Higgins asserts. “The script is totally forward-looking, and in production, you're in the present moment at all times.” A key moment late in the film, with specifics eliminated to avoid spoilers, forced him to go back to the drawing board and re-examine the entire philosophy of cutting the sequence.
“We had limited pieces of footage” for a big character reversal, Higgins admits, because “I had made one mistake in how I shot it. I should have been on one side of a shot.” In his desire to capture one of the film’s most evocative (and assuredly most expensive) images, he and editor Justin LaForge leaned on classical technique: “showing, [not telling]. It was not innovative in any way. If you want to convey a piece of information, this is how you should cut the scene.”
And then a funny thing happened: early audiences for the film did not come away with the conclusion they wanted.
“If you actually look[ed] at it, there's no way you would logically arrive at that conclusion,” Higgins describes. “However, people are seeing whatever they want to see.” LaForge helped him pinpoint the paradox of their construction. “He realized that in attempting to make it clear, we were creating the permission structure for the audience to read it however they wanted. But in fact, if we decided to intentionally make it unclear, to not illustrate it, to actually remove the evidence, there would be a different result.”
“The process is just full of things like that. That's why it's so fascinating,” Higgins muses. “If you like to think about how human beings work, then film is a great medium […] We bring everything we know about human nature and psychology to the table in film.”
“Maybe dental hygienists have to do that,” he quips, “but with film, the main event is thinking about how brains process stories and information, and what the relationship is going to be between the characters on-screen and the audience as mediated by the filmmakers.”
“This sounds silly and sounds like it should go without saying,” Higgins declares as our time nears a close, “but doing this should be enjoyable, healthy, and productive on a personal level for people. More often than not, it kind of sucks.”
The context is important: we’re speaking in the middle of Hot Labor Summer where both the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) have hit the picket lines to demand better ways of working. “I'm just thrilled, honestly, that this is happening,” he professes. “I hope it goes farther. It would not take a whole lot to protect people much better,” connecting the strikes to movements across the American labor movement to upend systems that are designed to exploit workers to benefit an increasingly small group of wealthy executives and elites.
He’s not surprised, of course, that artists are leading the charge. “That is actually the function of artists, to make people aware of what's going on.” Higgins is quick to reframe the conversation away from purely financial stakes to the strike, postulating that the money is downstream of a larger discussion about our true value as humans. “The financial part of it is an effect of the moral and ethical part of it,” he stipulates. “If we do the ethical and moral thing, it will also probably be financially better for everyone.”
Take the AI debate: Higgins is aware that a $12/month subscription service already exists that can direct a music video from beginning to end, something he’d probably expect a little bigger of a paycheck to do himself. Neither the quality nor the cost are his concern. “This is our opportunity to say human beings are an important part of the process,” he emphatically tells me. “It's not that we can't be replaced, it's that we SHOULD not.”
He’s out picketing when he can, but perhaps the more immediate change will come to his business of directing class now that he has seen a project through from Sundance to streaming. The biggest update? “Understanding the ins and outs of the different distribution models and why they are the way they are was new to me,” Higgins concedes. “The theatrical window was about making people aware that the movie was available […] discussions, screenings, and lots of Q&As reframed my understanding of how a movie gets released and how and why some movies become visible and a lot of movies don't.”
Quality counts, he admits, and he’s proud that God’s Country still feels like an expression of something within that he can still stand by after all those stages of its creation. “This fascinating thing happens where by the end of the edit, I usually have learned so much that the movie feels outdated to me in some way,” he discloses. “Only a few times have I felt when I've gotten to the end of the edit that the movie still represents me. God's Country was one of those times.”
“There are plenty of movies coming out that I'm sure are perfectly good but don't provoke cultural conversations,” Higgins postulates. “God's Country is a small contribution. It was really important to me and the other people who made it. Obviously, it didn't make $100 million at the box office, but I think when people see it, they don't have a mild response to it. People seem to really love it, or they absolutely object to it.”
He’s emerged from this year-and-a-half journey of distribution satisfied (though not naively sanguine) about the future of movies … a rarity, I must say. “I think there's a vast audience of grown-ups who wants smart, engaging, believable, thought-provoking material to watch,” Higgins proclaims. “When a movie is talking to me like I'm intelligent enough, it's like [me] with students. I really do believe students rise to elevated expectations. You don't talk down to your students, you try to bring them to a place where they're seeing something that they didn't see before.”
It all seems to connect for Julian Higgins as we end on a note where, once again, his ideas, ideals, and instincts sync up in a way only possible when someone deeply considers them. “There's a lot of overlap for me between teaching, producing, directing, writing,” he These are all creative, values-based systems. It's not like I'm the smartest guy in the room. I want to engage people in a process where we're discovering something together.”
That’s strictly metaphorical, of course, if you fire up God’s Country on Hulu. “I'm not in everyone's living room saying, ‘Well, we didn't get the location we wanted, so this isn't exactly how it was supposed to be.’ No one cares!” he tells me. “People watch a movie assuming that everything you did is a choice, and that's the responsibility that I feel like I have to embrace as a director.”
But I don’t think you’ll need excuses when you’re faced with something this exquisite. Hopefully, knowing a little bit more about the way God’s Country got made will enhance the viewing experience without explaining its intelligence away.
My thanks again to Julian Higgins for his time, his patience in waiting for me to stop dragging my heels and write this thing, and his attentiveness to all parts of the process in making God’s Country. Hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I relished getting to be a part of putting it together.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall
Halee, if you read this, please accept my sincerest apologies that when I decided to turn this into a profile, I could not find a way to shoehorn the minutes of gushing praise we traded about you. I’ll happily furnish the transcript upon subpoena, but please accept this little tidbit as a token of my gratitude for making this happen: “Whenever there was any question on the table, it was the two of us putting our heads together to try to figure out what to do. That's not to say that we always agreed on what to do ... actually, now that I think about it, I can't really think of any big disagreements we had about what to do.”