The production crew got their hands dirty for director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s drama “Harvest,” sowing the entire field – which apparently hadn’t been turned over in centuries – that was harvested in the historical film.
“The important thing to know is that we actually sowed the field that you saw that we harvested,” Tsangari told TheWrap’s Joe McGovern at TheWrap’s 2024 TIFF Studio sponsored by Moët & Chandon and Boss Design. The film was shot in Scotland. “It was an entire process of actually sowing the seeds.”
“Which hadn’t been touched in like 400 years, or something,” actor Caleb Landry Jones, who plays Walter Thirsk in the film, said.
“Harvest,” adapted from author Jim Crace’s 2013 book of the same title, follows the story of an uncharted village that disappears, where a townsman-turned-farmer named Walter and manor lord Charles Kent (Harry Melling) brace for an invasion from the outside world.
Tsangari, who was also joined by her other film’s star, Harry Melling, opened up about the film’s production process, saying it was a privilege for the crew to get the ability to rehearse prior to filming as independent creatives.
“We rehearsed and had lots of fun for a couple of weeks before we started shooting. It was a great experience because it’s very rare for producers for a film like ours to be given the luxury of rehearsing time,” Tsangari said. “So this was actually very important to me, to always rewrite the script after I cast and then while rehearsing. We completely emerged ourselves in this world that we built and we stayed there for a couple of months.”
Tsangari added that “Harvest” cast and crew were completely in sync with the help of rehearsals, which assisted with her decision to shoot scenes “without stopping.”
“It was a decision from the beginning to shoot on film, and because I always shoot the entire scene without stopping, so we’re not really doing coverage,” Tsangari said. “It’s just shooting everything from the beginning to end. There was a total immersion from all of us, kind of like choreography between camera [and] actors.
