An earthquake and an eclipse weren’t the only natural rarities that happened in New York City this past week. Did you hear about the sasquatch in Central Park? The makers of “Sasquatch Sunset” sure hope you did.
That’s because the sasquatch was a costume and his stroll through the park was a publicity push for the new film from the brothers David and Nathan Zellner. Opening in New York on Friday, the movie spends a year in the wild with a sasquatch pack — a male and female (Nathan Zellner and Riley Keough) and two younger sasquatches (Jesse Eisenberg and Christophe Zajac-Denek) — as they eat, have sex, fight predators and reckon with death.
Droll but big-hearted, the movie sits at the intersection of the ad campaign for Jack Link’s beef jerky, the 1987 comedy “Harry and the Hendersons” and a 1970s nature documentary, down to the hippie-vibe soundtrack.
What goes into a movie about Bigfoots? (Bigfeet?) Even after a day of following the costumed sasquatch around Central Park, we had questions for the cast and crew. They had answers, which have been edited and condensed.
What inspired the film?
DAVID ZELLNER We’ve been obsessed with Bigfoot since we were kids. It was such a fixture in ’70s pop culture. Any kind of ape-themed movie we loved, starting from the “2001” Dawn of Man sequence to the early “Planet of the Apes” movies. In the age of the internet, more footage came online of sightings, but it was always bigfoot strolling along in the woods. Why is the only footage of bigfoot the same thing? We wanted to see the full spectrum of its existence.
What drew the actors?
JESSE EISENBERG It’s told with an earnestness, not a hipster flippancy. It had two things you don’t find frequently: It was so unusual and so good. Reading it, I was just weeping with the characters, hysterically laughing. It felt like the full breadth of human experience but through the vehicle of these creatures.
RILEY KEOUGH I thought it was beautiful and hilarious and absurd and touching and crazy, all the things I love in a movie.
How did the actors prepare?
EISENBERG We looked at videos of apes and the Patterson-Gimlin footage, that famous shot of the sasquatch walking with his back to camera. I worked with this movement coach, Lorin Eric Salm, who studied under Marcel Marceau, and he created with us vocabulary and a style of movement. We had different grunts and calls for different reasons, a high-pitched echolalic thing when we looked for other sasquatches, and guttural sounds.
DAVID ZELLNER Every single thing these creatures do is stuff everyone has seen their dog or cat do. But when you have creatures with humanlike qualities doing it, it suddenly becomes uncomfortable.
What were the costumes made of?
STEVE NEWBURN, creature designer As a fan of “Harry and the Hendersons,” I had an idea of my ideal sasquatch design, which happened to be very close to what David and Nathan were thinking. We did full body casts. Everything was sculpted in clay first. The material for the costumes was a foam latex. It weighed, top to bottom, six or seven pounds. We put climbing boots on their feet and built around that to accommodate the terrain. The hair is a combination of synthetic hair and yak hair, and the face hair is human, custom knotted in the same way you’d build a wig.
Were the costumes and makeup hard to adjust to?
NEWBURN Usually when you do this work, the first direction is, please be careful with it. We did the opposite: roll around in those thorn bushes and jump in that river. I liked that they looked like wet dogs, vs. it looks like they came out of a salon.
KEOUGH I found that if I put diaper cream under the prosthetics that it would come off better. At the end of the night I would remove my own prosthetics, which was fun. When you wear that thing all day, you can’t wait to rip it off.
What’s the difference between directing sasquatch characters and human characters?
NATHAN ZELLNER When the actors put on the costumes, feeling the fur and being out in the wilderness with no sets and walking over logs: that really helped. Once all that was figured out really quickly, directing them wasn’t like, you need to move like this, it was more like normal directing.
DAVID ZELLNER It reminded us of silent film acting, in terms of how much information you can convey through the eyes. In a lot of creature work, actors will have contacts or have VFX eyes. But we wanted the rawness of their actual eyes, like in Buster Keaton’s films, how much he expressed with just the subtlest glance, or in “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” how much she conveyed, looking into her eyes.
Is it a family-friendly movie?
KEOUGH It depends on the family. [Laughs] I think the audience is everybody. It might be scary for small children.
DAVID ZELLNER It’s rated R for nudity, which is the funniest thing.