One of the most astounding characters in A24’s new fantasy-adventure movie The Legend of Ochi is the titular mythical creature, a monkeylike animal with golden fur and big ears. While the other ochi in the movie are slightly bigger than human-sized, the main ochi is just a baby, small enough to perch on a kid’s shoulder. But even though it’s a mythical wee creature, it isn’t a digital effect: It’s a puppet being maneuvered simultaneously by a team of seven people.
[Ed. note: This post contains some slight setup spoilers for The Legend of Ochi.]
The ochi, an apelike animal that lives in the Carpathian Mountains, is a fictional creature created by writer-director Isaiah Saxon. The people who live near the mountain range fear the ochi and consider them monsters. Grizzled Maxim (Willem Dafoe) hunts them down; isolated Dasha (Emily Watson) left her village to study them. But when their lonely 12-year-old daughter Yuri (Helena Zengel) finds a lost baby ochi, she bonds with it and becomes determined to return it to its home deep in the forest. While the two can’t communicate verbally, they share a special bond, and eventually forge their own way toward understanding each other.
Yuri and the baby ochi’s scenes range from a frenetic grocery store chase, where Yuri must hide the creature from curious onlookers, to more subdued, intimate interactions. But while the scenes with a lot of moving parts were certainly demanding, both Saxon and Zengel agreed in an interview with Polygon that the quieter scenes challenged them most.
“There’s certainly a lot of physical challenge to doing the action stuff, but it’s so much more forgiving, because you’re going to cut a lot, and you might not be in a tight shot, and there’s a lot of motion,” explains Saxon. “But when you’re doing the intimate scenes between Helena and Baby Ochi, the whole movie is resting on those scenes and them feeling completely real. Every little moment, every little micro beat being completely authentic, both on Helena’s side and on the Baby Ochi side. And getting them to line up together where they’re both giving the best performance at the same moment, that was the highest pressure.”
“You have no language or almost no language, but you have to show so much, and you want the audience to believe you,” adds Zengel.
Image: A24
Her scenes with the creature went beyond just communicating without language cues, because it wasn’t just Zengel and the ochi on the set — was Zengel, the ochi puppet, and those seven puppeteers. But when the camera zooms in, the focus is just on Zengel and the creature.
“The biggest challenge for me was to get a whole scene to play through with the two of them in a wide view, where both performances are lining up every little beat,” Saxon says. “That almost proved impossible, because Baby Ochi is created by seven people all syncing up, and Helena is her own natural phenomenon. So [it was tough] to get all of these phenomena to give the best take they’re ever going to give, right at the exact same moment, for a long scene held together the way that you might be able to expect from Willem Dafoe and Emily Watson. That was so hard.”
Saxon says that while he was able to splice together a few scenes with Zengel and the puppet shot from separate angles on different takes, many shots had the ochi perched right on Zengel’s shoulder, which was particularly challenging. Zengel says working with puppets takes a lot more patience than people might realize.
“It takes a long fucking time to get the ochi right, get my face right, concentrate, get the shot,” laughs Zengel. “It’s normal. We’re all humans. Sometimes the camera is on the wrong angle, or I look the wrong way, or I start to laugh, or the puppeteers move him the wrong way. I think sometimes I drove Isaiah crazy by saying, ‘Oh, why do we have to do one more shot?’”
The Legend of Ochi is out in limited release now, expanding to wide release on April 25.
Content shared from www.polygon.com.