In Max Walker-Silverman’s Rebuilding, Dusty (Josh O’Connor) struggles to get his life on track after losing his generational family ranch to wildfires and to connect with his daughter Callie (Lily LaTorre) as he adjusts to his new reality.
Awards Buzz spoke with Walker-Silverman, who reflected on the conscious decision not to show Dusty’s sprawling property before the fire:
“It’s a film about the past and the future, and what we’re left with in between those things, which of course is the present. In the case of the main character, the past is erased, or at least he feels like it’s erased. My hope over the course of the film is that we, the audience, begin to have a feel for the place as it was, even though we can’t really see it, which is sort of the way memory works. I hope that there’s enough affection felt for it that you can almost follow. That’s the idea, because memory is so fickle, and it’s not static. It’s this changing thing that we can invent, we can erase, we can modify, we can create and preserve. I hope that being with this character, we experience some version of that as well. I also could never imagine taking the worst day of someone’s life and dramatizing that, figuring out how to put that in a movie and making that exciting. It’s not a very nice concept to me, so this is the way we went about it.”
It’s a big year for O’Connor, who also stars in The History of Sound, The Mastermind, and Wake Up Dead Man, and Walker-Silverman shared how he first saw him in God’s Own Country and their very positive process of collaboration.
Rebuilding opens in select theatres on Friday, November 14th.
