Nathan you actually had the pleasure of playing one of the Sasquatches, can you share how long the process was getting into that costume and just how sweaty did that get?

Nathan: Hahaha! It was GALLONS of sweat!

I knew you were roasting in that suit!

Nathan: Haha yes I was! We had a rehearsal period that started on Zoom and then when we met in person Jesse Eisenberg had brought in a movement coach that he had worked with prior. The rehearsal wasn’t really to talk through emotional beats, I mean we do but it wasn’t like rehearsing lines or anything like that, it was more like trying to just get everyone comfortable with behaving like an animal. We were learning how to react from our id and subconscious more and how to technically move so that we’re all looking like a family, like a species. 

There are a lot of rules that you can make up because there’s only so much baseline to Bigfoot available, we built the movement off of the one famous video of it walking. It kind of lumbers and that gave us seeds to work from but a lot of it was taken from watching primate videos of how orangutans eat foods and hold things. Once you got that costume on it was a fully immersive process. it was really fun to disappear behind that makeup because you felt pretty uninhibited as you had about 40 pounds of fur on top of you. Thankfully, we shot kind of late in the fall so the weather, for the most part, was on our side, but there were a couple of days where the sun was just beating on you and you could just feel yourself baking underneath the costume. So when we would eventually pull it off the undersuit was just drenched in sweat.

You finished filming two sizes smaller!

David: Haha yes it was like a sweat sponge!

It’s very different to a Planet of the Apes type film because you’re not as reliant on CGI and you’re really having to become this animal. Did you feel like immersing yourself so much in the character there were days you had to remind yourself to shake off the Neanderthal?

Nathan: No no, because it wasn’t as method as that. Most of the time in between takes, we were trying to conserve energy because it took so much energy.

We wanted to do old-school prosthetics work and most of the time this type of work is done on sound stages and from a green screen so it’s a little bit more controlled environment, so we had a lot of challenges. But from an acting standpoint, you’re usually worried about overacting, because when you’re an actor it’s a lot about being subtle but when you have all this makeup on, you have to really project it and move through it. Even a slight head turn has to be a bigger movement so that you can get through the latex suits and the fur. So that was the biggest thing to learn from an acting standpoint.

It’s very theatrical, almost taking it back to silent films…

David: Yes because we’re big fans of silent films but it wasn’t until we started making it that we realised we have to kind of rewire our braids to convey information in a way we weren’t used to and hadn’t done before.