


“One Christmas, I bumped into a friend from high school, and I told him I was working on this movie,” Ross says. Ross, production designer Russell Barnes, and Mortensen went about building a plausible living situation, drawing on their own experiences as well as discussions with experts and people who lived this way. Of chief concern were basic necessities: food, sanitation, shelter, and water. Once he had decided to place the Cash family in the woods, Ross had to figure out how they’d survive there. “I think we’ve lost connection to the natural environment in ways that are profound and sad. “I had this idea of, ‘what if there’s a couple that really say, I’m going to devote my entire existence to my children, every waking moment, because it goes fast, it’s not going to last forever, but I want to be present for them, and I want to give them that gift.’ What would that be like? ” Ross says.
#Captain fantastic how to
When he sat down to write about the experience of deciding how to raise children, it led him back to his childhood and his mother’s atypical lifestyle. Ross lived with his mother and brother in commune environments as a child in the ‘80s, and he recalls wandering for hours and hours across public land with his brother, playing death-defying games with bows and arrows. The idea behind Captain Fantastic may seem extreme, but it came from a familiar drama: choosing how to parent in a world that offers very different approaches. “With this movie,” Ross explains, “I said over and over again, These are real people, this is the real world, this is happening, this is not a fantasy.” Here’s how he went about (convincingly) bringing that reality to the screen. One of the main challenges for Ross was creating believable characters and respecting a way of life that for some people actually exists. In it, a proudly self-sufficient man named Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) must take his woods-raised brood back into the real world after the death of his wife. That’s the makings of Captain Fantastic, out today, which premiered at Sundance and won Ross a directing prize at Cannes.
#Captain fantastic movie
With his new movie Captain Fantastic, director Matt Ross - whom you might know better as Gavin Belson on Silicon Valley - asks a provocative question: What if, instead of letting kids eat from the endless sugar trough and stare at the omnipresent screens of modern childhood, a couple of parents went out into the wilderness and raised them away from the corrupting influence of society? And what if they did this not as a lark or an intellectual experiment, but as an honest-to-goodness way of life? Nonetheless, they go, only to find that Jack and his wife Abigail want to take custody of the children away from Ben.Photo: Regan MacStravic/Electric City Entertainment His father-in-law, Jack, even threatens to have him arrested if Ben shows up at the funeral. He knows his wife's family doesn't agree with his ideas about raising children. When their mother, who's been hospitalized due to a number of mental ailments, commits suicide, the children want to attend her funeral.Īgainst his will, Ben takes them on the journey. They hunt for their own food, with large, serrated Bowie knives. The children, who never come into contact with any other people, are raised on a rigorous physical and intellectual schedule. They live a secluded life in the isolated forests of the Pacific Northwest. Ben ( Viggo Mortensen) is a devoted father of six children.
