The summer movie season has a new creature for audiences to fall in love with in The Legend of Ochi. The latest A24 installment from first-time feature film director Isaiah Saxon ventures to Carpathia, an island inhabited by a species of effectively nocturnal creatures called the Ochi, and chronicles the native animals’ contentious and miscommunicative relationship with the human residents.

While inspired by several real-life species, the magic of the Ochi comes in their originality. That goes beyond the тιтular creature’s baby blue face and burnt orange fur, as a key element of the Ochi came in the design of their sound.

ScreenRant spoke with Saxon as well as stars Emily Watson, Finn Wolfhard, and Helena Zengel to dissect how the Ochi were brought to life and what the film’s stars did to form a connection with the creatures.

Director Isaiah Saxon Discovered The Ochi’s Sound On YouTube

“I searched high and low for inspiration…”

Despite coming from legend, the тιтular creatures in The Legend of Ochi have their roots in one real-life YouTuber.

“The goal from the beginning was to create a believable animal language that had a musical quality, something akin to dolphins and birds, but something that felt like it was coming from a primate. I searched high and low for inspiration and I landed on this throat whistler I found on YouTube named Paul Manalatos,” director Isaiah Saxon revealed. “He just had one video, and it was just him in his basement and he is like, ‘Hey guys, look what I can do in my throat,’ and he just started making the sound that is the sound of the Ochi.”

Rather than simply use Manalatos’ video as a reference, Saxon decided to bring the one-off YouTuber into the production himself.

“I reached out to him, and he started telling me about how his life story was exactly the girl’s story in the movie, and that he had grown up in a similar way without his mom in the picture and had turned to black metal and throat whistling as his comfort, and it was just really incredible,” Saxon continued. “We got him in the booth, and for two days he was just like any other actor, performing all the emotional articulation that was demanded of the moment, but with this kind of throat whistled chirp.

“I then edited it with a little bit of mockingbird and raven, and for the bigger Ochi, sometimes adding a little whale. It was really one of the more fun aspects, shaping the sound of that and its musical nature. Then I worked with my wife, composer Meara O’Reilly, to turn it into an actual sort of symphonic pocketed musical form.”

The unconventional approach to bringing a story like The Legend of Ochi to life is what attracted one of the film’s biggest names to the project in the first place.

“You wrote me when you saw the film, ‘Proper Weirdos. Good,'” Saxon said, turning to star Emily Watson. “You got it.”

“That was an immediate, ‘Yeah, I want to be there,'” Watson responded. “And then I had a costume fitting and I went, ‘Oh my God, I love this.'”

Watson plays Dasha, an estranged resident on Carpathia that has her own complicated history with the island’s inhabitants, both Ochi and humans.

“When this first came to me, it was one of those things where you go, ‘Ooh, that smells different. Interesting. Weird, funny, pungent in a really great way,'” Watson recalled. “That was one of the really great things about it, that it’s a kids’ movie, and it’s a beautiful, inspiring, very, very positive story, but it’s got these really grown up and messed up people in it who don’t behave like typical characters in those kind of stories. I’m playing a mom who offers a kid a cigarette during a sort of life advice session.”

Source: Screen Rant Plus

Helena Zengel & Finn Wolfhard’s Take Themselves To Carpathia

“It was kind of a dream come true…”

The “kids’ movie” aspect is carried out by leading star Helena Zengel. The 16-year-old German actor plays Yuri, the human that empathizes with one wounded Ochi and sets consequently sets the film’s full narrative off.

“When I first read the script, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be CGI or not, and how much I was actually going to interact with the Ochi on set,” Zengel said when asked how she developed her bond with the creatures. “When I found out it was going to be a puppet and there were going to be people on set that would make the sounds and make it move, I was so excited.

“When I was a child, I used to have lots of puppets and I was very sure they could speak, I just couldn’t hear them. It was kind of a dream come true, and they looked so real. It didn’t even look like mate or a puppet.”

Not all of the film’s kids are as kind to the primates. Finn Wolfhard stars as Petro, Maxim’s (Willem Dafoe) first in command in the nightly hunts of the Ochi.

“There’s a real inner conflict within Petro because at his core, he’s just a nice guy who I think actually cares a lot about Yuri and about animals generally, or cares about people more than he leads on,” Wolfhard said. “At the same time, the only father-figure he’s really had is Maxim. He’s trying to please these people but at the same time, he’s trying to be there for his adopted sister, but can’t really because he’s blocked by this toxic masculine force that’s been put onto him. I think he’s fighting between these two kinds of people to be.”

While they both are a bit of a toxic parental presence on screen, veteran talent like Dafoe and Watson led by example on set in a way that left the film’s younger stars learning about the craft just from observation.

“The one thing that impresses me the most, especially from Willem and Emily, is that every time we do a scene, it’s always the same emotion,” Zengel praised. “They would cry 500 times with the same intensity. That’s just crazy to me. It looks so real every single time. Even just freaking out screaming 500 times without complaining.”

Source: ScreenRant Plus