Director Michael Johnson, Producer Glenn Howerton, Isabelle Fuhrman On ‘The Wilderness Of James,’ SXSW [VIDEO EXCLUSIVE]

MICHAEL JOHNSON: The story just started as a short story that I wrote a number of years ago, and the story was about a kid and his psychologist and the story takes place solely in the office of the psychologists. They’re very cryptic. The kid was really obsessed with death and we didn’t know why. It was kind of a chess match between these two and that’s kind of where it started, that’s where the seed started. As far as the scripts concerned, I just wanted to know more about the character, and I wanted to know why he was doing the things he was doing, so that’s when I started writing about James, that’s how the script came up.

ISABELLE FUHRMEN: I’d like to show young people in their natural setting. You know, kind of how it feels to be growing up and how it feels to be kind of experiencing things that, for the first time are adult and are kind of hard to deal with – like loss and meeting someone you fall in love with for the first time and betrayal. I think that that was something that really hit home was the fact that it was very real and it wasn’t over done. It wasn’t over dramatized. It was kind of just there and it was kind of natural and it was about relationships, and I think the relationships we make at this age are the most important relationships we make in our lives.

GlENN HOWERTON: I’ve known Michael for many years and I’ve seen various things that he had shot around Portland and L.A. - music videos and things like that. So I was always very impressed, but we were just buddies outside of the business, and I just asked him if he wanted to do something else, and he told me about this script that he wrote. I said, 'Give it to me! I’d love to just read it. I wasn’t expecting anything, not that I didn’t think Michael was a smart guy, but when you read your friend’s scripts you’re like, ‘Uhhh what’s this going to be?’ It’s going to be bad and I have to figure out how to like get constructive you know thoughts and feedback.'

MJ: I thought it was really, I’m very proud of you for finishing it!

GH: Yeah! Good work even getting to the end! But I read it, and I was like, 'This is amazing! I mean it had such a - it was like Isabelle said, it felt so real and yet at the same time it was like poetry. It read like a piece of poetry, and it had a heightened quality to it that just awakened in me all those feelings that I had when I was 15, and I don’t know it’s like any good piece of art. You don’t know why exactly why it makes you feel the way you feel. I just knew that there was something there, and I knew that I wanted to make it the first film I produced. You know seeing it on screen, every time I watch it, I feel the same way. I’m just like it makes me feel the way I felt when I was that age. I think that’s a very difficult thing to do and to do well, and I think Michael just nailed it from start to finish.

MJ: I think the visual mood of the movie is constantly reflecting and mirroring what James is going through and you know that changes throughout the course of the story. It was meant a lot of it to feel a little poetic and times because I think when you’re a teenager you know, things are poetic and things are more romantic and the you know the highs are higher and the lows are lower, we tried to represent that visually so it's constantly swarming and changing depending on what he’s going through, depending on where he is. So hopefully that came across.

GH: I think the wilderness imagery and everything really resonated with me to this feeling that there are animals inside you that want to break free and any time that you shut yourself off because of some experience that you had and this movie is really about finding people in your life like Val or like Evan’s character Harmon and all of a sudden it awakens those beasts and those beasts start to come free and they start to let loose and you start to become maybe a little, you come a little closer to ultimately who you are. And it’s a vivid wild experience and the highs are so high and the lows are so low when you’re at that age.

IF: You know, I feel Val kind of covers herself up with this confident kind of air about her, but she’s really go this kind of insecure and upset interior heart, and I feel like James kind of blocks himself off from everything. And they meet each other and they’re both intrigued by each other and they end up kind of coaxing out what they really feel and certain secrets, and I think that at the end James kind of reveals everything to her. I think that was so powerful to me. I just loved the way they interacted.

GW: I also love that you get — James is so shy around Harmon when he meets Harmon, and he’s so afraid to talk to people, and Harmon brings something out of him and then in a weird way like he is almost open and friendly with you than with anybody else in the entire movie. He’s so afraid of everybody else and weirdly enough of you and he actually draws you out in a weird way which I don’t know I think is so interesting.

MJ: I think that you know like your character and Harmon’s character, what they represent in this movie is life essentially and when James starts the movie, the protagonist is obsessed with death so you know it’s about him you know learning to you know wake up and smell the roses, a better term. He obviously dealing with something, he’s dealing with his father not being around, and he’s coming to terms with that and he’s trying to navigate that.