Publicity about the Feature Film Sasquatch Sunset
The following interviews, articles, and reviews mention Lorin’s movement coaching and vocal coaching for the feature film Sasquatch Sunset or comment on the cast’s performances in the film. Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Christophe Zajac-Denek, and Nathan Zellner play a family of Sasquatches, with no dialogue, using only movement, facial expressions, and vocal sounds to express themselves. Sasquatch Sunset was written by David Zellner and co-directed by David and Nathan Zellner.
Bleecker Street Media Press Notes
Sasquatch Camp
Prior to the advent of principal photography the cast assembled in Eureka, California, for a week of rehearsal and an intensive movement workshop “Ape camp,” says David.
Sasquatch training meant learning to walk, lounge, sleep, and eat in a manner unique to each character, but consistent as group members of the same non-human species. Eisenberg brought in Lorin Eric Salm, his movement coach for Eisenberg’s role as Marcel Marceau for the biopic Resistance. “He worked with us to kind of codify how we walk, how we emote. He’s wonderful with facial expressions as well,” says Eisenberg.
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Jesse Eisenberg Interview: Becoming a Sasquatch & Now You See Me 3 Update (Video interview with Jesse Eisenberg at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival)
Collider Interviews | YouTube — Moderated by Perri Nemiroff
Perri Nemiroff: “Been talking about Lorin a lot lately because of this movie and also because of the movement work he did on Lisa Frankenstein as well. Very curious: What is the element of moving like a Sasquatch that came most naturally to you, but then, also, what was the thing that was most difficult to adopt and kind of like break from the human norm?”
Jesse Eisenberg: . . . “It was often times little things like how your hand is holding—but for me, the main thing was just, like, the pace of walking. And you mentioned Lorin Salm, who’s an old friend of mine, and so I brought him onto this because I did this mime movie with him . . . now you’ve met him because of Lisa Frankenstein.”
Nemiroff: . . . “I’m fascinated by his work.”
Eisenberg: . . . “His work is so great . . . . He studied under Marcel Marceau and is now a movement coach on all these movies . . . . I brought him into this so that we can all be consistent . . . .”
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Inside Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough’s ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ Transformations (Exclusive)
By Alex Welch | A.frame (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
Ahead of filming, the cast met for “Sasquatch Camp.” Eisenberg recruited his movement coach Lorin Eric Salm, with whom he’d work on 2020’s ‘Resistance.’ (In that movie, Eisenberg portrayed the French mime, Marcel Marceau.) Over a week of rehearsals and movement intensives, [Lorin] and the cast created a new language together.
Jesse Eisenberg: . . . We were listening to sounds that were produced by people who claimed to have audio of Sasquatch, but those differed in so many ways. I just thought, “If we’re going to do this, we need to be of the same species, of the same family, and yet individual.” I asked Lorin to come in and work with us to come up with a kind of vocabulary we could all use together.
. . . It all became very consistent and legible to the point that we could believably feel like we were all part of the same group of Sasquatch. Lorin also worked with all of us individually. My character, for instance, I thought of as a poet, as somebody who contemplates the more beautiful parts of life. That meant that I would look at nature in a different way than Nathan’s character, who’s the alpha of the group and is trying to find food and shelter and always trying to dominate the world around him.
. . .
Riley Keough: Working with Lorin is when I started to feel more comfortable, because he made this road map for us. We didn’t have to just figure it all out from scratch on our own. Our process became about mixing together all of these different references, and from that, we were able to create this species together, which was really fun. . . . Learning how to eat, pick things up, move our fingers, react to objects, and interact with our environment like Sasquatch would was really fun — and hilarious.
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Riley Keough Interview: Sasquatch Sunset and Making This Very Silly Movie Believable (Video interview with the cast and directors at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Transcript available as an article on Collider.com)
Collider Interviews | YouTube — Moderated by Perri Nemiroff
Perri Nemiroff: “I’m so fascinated by your work with movement—a movement coach—I think someone Jesse had brought in for the production. Can you maybe each give us . . . a pillar or a specific technique you learned from this movement coach that everyone will be able to see you applying to your work in the finished film?”
. . .
Nathan Zellner: “When we had this Zoom session with the movement coach and everybody was supposed to, like, get into this sort of a primate sort of animal mindset and just sort of walk around your room or your space and pick up things and discover them and a lot of that turned into putting stuff in your mouth.”
Riley Keough: . . . “He really helped with our walk. That was something that was super helpful, like to make our walk . . . we had the same walk—but obviously we have different characters—but the walk of that—the famous Sasquatch video and the pose you sort of see them frozen in. We kind of took that and turned it into a movement, and he really helped with that. And then just the finding . . . how human and how ape to be was interesting.”
. . .
Christophe Zajac-Denek: “I think it was interesting working with Lorin, learning how to pick things up with your whole . . . not using your fingertips but grasping more . . . with your hand . . . .”
. . .
Keough: “They had obviously done their homework and we got sent a huge list of videos and sounds and all these things, so it was kind of like combining all of them, which was cool.”
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Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg Spent Two Hours Transforming Into Bigfoot With ‘Tons of Fur’ for Absurdist Sundance Movie ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ (Article and video interview with the cast and directors at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival)
By Rebecca Rubin | Variety.com
“The actors insist they didn’t go Method to embody the Yeti, but they did attend several days of ‘Sasquatch School’ on set and worked with a mime coach, who was hired by Eisenberg.”
Moderator: “What was the preparation process like? Were you going to Sasquatch school to learn how to move?”
Riley Keough: “We did. We had a few days of Sasquatch school.”
Jesse Eisenberg: “I had a mime teacher named Lorin Eric Salm . . . and he does stuff like this. So when we were looking to rehearse and looking to have some kind of cohesive movement amongst us so that we looked like we were part of the same family . . . I called him and he came out to where we were shooting and he basically went through movements and we went through eating . . . the nuances of living day to day and also moving.”
Keough: “I feel like we kind of took the original—the most famous Sasquatch clip as the basis and then worked backwards from there . . .”
Nathan Zellner: “It’s this clip that . . . everybody has seen, so there is a sort of familiarity that people have with how Sasquatch is supposed to move and how they kind of look. But other than that, you know, it’s shrouded in mystery, so we had to come up with a lot of things on our own. So we watched a lot of Internet videos on primate behavior and—”
Keough: “We also just sat and improvised for hours in an office. It was really funny, but that kind of also informed our Sasquatch language . . . We wanted to have our own unique characters but also have to speak the same language, so we came up with our own dialect.”
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Exclusive: Christophe Zajac-Denek Talks Becoming Bigfoot in Sasquatch Sunset (Video interview and article)
Interview & article by James Melzer | MovieWeb
“When it came time to put everything into practice, an unlikely ally was brought on board by way of Lorin Eric Salm, a movement coach that Eisenberg worked with previously, who was trained by the famed French mime artist Marcel Marceau. Training included learning how to eat, and even something as minuscule as carrying a stick. For Zajac-Denek, it was some of the most fun he’d ever had for a role.
“‘Jesse had worked with Lorin Eric Salm prior—he’s a movement coach that was trained by Marcel Marceau. The guy’s just a movement genius. . . . We did a couple of Zoom calls with him, and then he also came up to Eureka and taught us how to eat berries and arugula and carry sticks around an office building. I don’t know if I’ve had more fun in my life. That was so much fun, just kind of destroying an office room in a building. It was great.'”
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For Sundance Sasquatch film, Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough went to a NorCal ‘ape camp’
SFGATE culture editor Dan Gentile asked Eisenberg about his prep for ‘Sasquatch Sunset’
By Dan Gentile | SFGATE.com
“Despite the star power, the actors are unrecognizable under layers of heavy prosthetics. Emoting without dialogue and doing those often campy and sometimes poignant ‘other things’ required a crash course in animal behavior: an ‘ape camp’ which began online and continued in Eureka over the course of a week before filming began.
“‘It started on Zoom, with us lumbering around and trying to move in an ape-like, half-ape, half-man kind of way. It was just super fun,’ Zajac-Denek told SFGATE on the Sundance red carpet. ‘There was one moment when Lorin [Eric Salm], our motion guy, asked us to just place a shoe on the ground and approach a shoe as a Sasquatch… It was a great exercise to get us in the mental state of not having seen an object before and what would I do with it.’
“When SFGATE asked Eisenberg and Keough about ape camp, they noted that learning to eat as a Sasquatch was one of the weirder parts of the experience.
“’We ate a lot of vegetables,’ Keough said.
“’And salmon and leaves,’ added Eisenberg.
“’Salmon doesn’t sound weird, but it was weird how it was done,’ Keough said.”
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How Jesse Eisenberg “saved the day” by helping to fund ‘Sasquatch Sunset’
By Mark Salisbury | Screendaily.com
“In addition to financial support, Eisenberg also brought the movement coach he had worked with on 2020’s Resistance, in which he played French mime artist Marcel Marceau. ‘We wanted to make sure all four of us were acting as the same species, and had a similar walk or postures,’ says Nathan, who would direct alongside his brother while wearing full sasquatch makeup.
“Prior to filming, the cast took part in an ‘Ape Camp’. ‘We were improvising, testing out edible plants,’ says Nathan. ‘We watched a lot of primate videos and got inspiration from those and other Bigfoot lore, and came up with the whoopings and the ways they would communicate.’”
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Bigfoot challenge: David and Nathan Zellner on turning a myth into a reality for Sasquatch Sunset
By Amber Wilkinson | Eye For Film
“David says: ‘. . . There’s no dialogue in the script, it’s very detailed scene descriptions about their emotional state, almost written more like prose, I guess. In the rehearsal process, we had a movement coach that Jesse brought in, we worked with, to get a kind of a uniformity in their, their physicality . . . and vocalisations.'”
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The Zellner Brothers Talk Their Sundance Movie ‘Sasquatch Sunset’: “Growing Up, There Was A Lot Of Ape Cinema That We Were Exposed To”
By Damon Wise | Deadline.com
“NATHAN: . . . Once everyone was cast, we had a lot of Zoom calls and Sasquatch camp where we were sort of coming up with their mannerisms and the way they grunted and communicated with each other, because what we wanted to do was make sure that everybody had the same sort of baseline and the same sort of structure so that you’re looking at a species that feels consistent. All four actors feel like they’re talking the same language and moving the same way. That was really key to the believability of what we were trying to do. So, we practiced eating things. We practiced walking. We practiced grooming each other.”
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‘Sasquatch Sunset’ Is a Love Letter to Bigfoot Fans
By Diana Helmuth | Pajiba
“Due to the movie’s total lack of dialogue, all emotions had to be expressed through grunts and physical actions. For this challenge, movement coach Lorin Eric Salm was brought in, who worked with Eisenberg for his role as Marcel Marceau in Resistance. The team’s work shows. All the actors do an incredible job, but the crown really goes to Keough. The depth of emotion she expresses through only physical gestures and eyework is truly impressive. You feel absolutely everything she feels. There’s very little doubt about what is ever going on in her head.”
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On the Cast’s Performances
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‘Sasquatch Sunset’ Review – Riley Keough Monkeys Around in Hilarious and Fascinating Gross-Out Comedy | Berlinale 2024
By Ben Rolph | AwardsWatch
“Lathered in prosthetics and great furry costumes, the cast is wholly unrecognisable. Riley Keough is a standout, and arguably the lead Sasquatch as she has the most screen time. Not a word is spoken and yet, Keough is so emotive with her eyes which act as a gateway to the soul of her character. It’s one of the only features of the actors that’s on show, apart from their movement and animal-like noises which also say a lot and contribute to the comedy of it all. Jesse Eisenberg and the rest of the cast put in great physical performances, all of the comedy comes from the way they react to things. It’s ridiculous that they managed to get top talent involved in such a peculiar film, but perhaps the uniqueness of it is what sold them the project. Imagine the actors getting into character, for weeks at a time, shooting a movie in Bigfoot costumes and not speaking a word, madness.”
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SASQUATCH SUNSET IS MOVING AND GROSSLY ADORABLE
The Zellner Brothers cast big-time actors as grunting, pooping cryptids — and it works like a charm.
By Siddhant Adlakha | Inverse
“The performances are, quite simply, astounding. They’re reminiscent of the men in ape costumes in the prologue of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the same sense of hesitance and discovery, but the Zellners use of close-ups tethers us to them spiritually. They may not always emote and behave like Homo sapiens, but once the camera lingers on them for long enough, and the actors build fears and motivations through subtle reactions and darting eyes, they feel distinctly human.”