Debra Granik has an eye for talent – just don't call her latest star Thomasin McKenzie 'the new Jennifer Lawrence'

The director's new film 'Leave No Trace' is based on the true story of a father and daughter who survived in the wild, hiding out in Oregon state park

Thomasin McKenzie in 'Leave No Trace' (Sony)

Debra Granik surely has an eye for young talent. The Massachusetts filmmaker’s second feature, 2010’s Ozarks-set Winter’s Bone, launched a young Jennifer Lawrence, who won an Oscar nomination for her performance as a 17-year-old who looks after her mentally ill mother and her siblings. While Lawrence has gone on to gain three more Academy Award nods, even winning for Silver Linings Playbook, she arguably hasn’t been more compelling than in Granik’s hands.

So perhaps it’s unsurprising that Granik groans when I ask her to compare Lawrence to her latest discovery, Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, the 17-year-old New Zealand-born star of her new movie, Leave No Trace.

“That’s always going to come up,” she sighs. “I’m not going to slag you off on this, but I get so exhausted, because why would we ever take two human beings and try to conflate them?”

It’s a fair point, although the comparisons are more than just spuriously claiming that McKenzie is “the next Jennifer Lawrence”. McKenzie’s performance is raw and real, and she more than holds her own alongside Ben Foster, one of Hollywood’s most intense performers in films like The Program and Hell or High Water.

Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie in ‘Leave No Trace’ (Sony)

A father-daughter story, loosely inspired by a real-life incident, Leave No Trace is a quietly devastating work.

Foster plays Will, a troubled combat veteran who is living off-grid with his young daughter Tom (McKenzie). So off-grid, in fact, they are camped out in the wilderness of an Oregon state park, hidden away and foraging off the land to survive. But when they’re spotted and discovered by the authorities, Will and Tom are forced to return to the society that they – or at least he – had rejected.

Both McKenzie and Foster went through intense wilderness training.

“We knew it was imperative for this film,” says Granik. “Those things had to be performed on camera. You don’t just pick up a knife and know how to do it safely. Especially when he was hacking things and removing the tinder, and lighting a fire in a moist climate, with wet materials. These aren’t things that anyone can just walk on the set and do.”

It’s here that Granik admits the Lawrence comparisons are valid (not least because J-Law went through similar prep for Winter’s Bone, even learning how to skin a squirrel).

Jennifer Lawrence in ‘Winter’s Bone’

“They might want very different things, but where the similarities are tremendous [is in how] these two young women exhibited very similar work ethics. Putting their all in it, getting dirty with it. On the literal level, the film was up in both their fingernails.”

The Wellington-born McKenzie took to this hands-on approach straight away.

“It was amazing learning how to live without having to rely on everyday appliances,” she says. “Without having to rely on heaters to get warmth or a tap to get water. Learning how to make a fire and collect water, and listening to the birds and the signals and the cues they give you about what’s going on in the forest, and walking undetected. Not leaving as much as a footprint.”

The preparation period with Foster was dominated by silence, she adds. “We weren’t doing a lot of talking. There was a lot of listening and thinking. You wouldn’t expect it but that is a really bonding thing to do: just to be with each other but not to have to talk.”

They were thrust straight into wilderness training on the first day they met, but McKenzie was impressed with his survival skills from the get-go: “He arrived an hour before I did and he built a hut. Then I tested it out. I had a lot of faith in him that it wouldn’t collapse… and it didn’t!”

Granik, who comes from a documentary background, admits she requires this level of commitment and realism from her actors. “I need it for the films to work. For sure.”

And, she adds, it has to come naturally from them. “I’ve learned you can’t really demand it. Someone has to want to give it.”

Thomasin McKenzie in ‘Leave No Trace’ (Sony)

Both Lawrence and McKenzie fit the bill: “Those similarities are good ones. They’re laudable ones, ones I would celebrate as a low-budget filmmaker because it means that this person isn’t just expecting to walk on. They’re expecting to contribute.”

Granik puts it down to hunger in McKenzie. “She’s eager. She’s got an appetite. She would like to work; she’s not just having someone tell her what would be good for her career,” she says, before offering that she saw the same hunger to learn in Lawrence.

“They both were really truly learning from the more experienced actors they were playing with. That means you’ve got to not feel like you got it all sewn up. You can’t be cocky. You’ve got to be porous too, and have this appetite for a whole bunch of things.”

In the case of McKenzie, it helps that she spent her early years surrounded by those in the film industry. Her mother Miranda and grandmother Kate are both actresses, while her father Stuart McKenzie is a director. Her brother and sisters have all acted too.

“I learnt a lot through osmosis, watching and listening to them, looking at their techniques and what they think acting is,” she says. “They’ve really supported me throughout my whole journey.”

Even so, being around it all the time, McKenzie wasn’t always in love with the profession. “I didn’t use to want to be an actress… I was sick of it pretty much.”

Then she took on the life-changing Consent: The Louise Nicholas Story, a 2014 true-life film about one woman’s fight for justice after she was raped by several policemen. McKenzie played the young Nicholas.

“There were some really scary and horrible scenes I had to film, but that’s what made me realise acting is not acting, it’s being. It’s making a difference,” she says.

McKenzie gathered significant experience before teaming up with Granik. Appearing in perennial Kiwi soap Shortland Street, she also took a small role as Astrid in The Hobbit – The Battle of the Five Armies.

Now she’s on a roll following Leave No Trace. She’s just shot The King, with Robert Pattinson and Timothee Chalamet, and The True History of the Kelly Gang with Russell Crowe and Nicholas Hoult.

Currently, she’s filming Jojo Rabbit, the story of a young man in Hitler’s army who discovers his mother is hiding a Jewish boy in his home. Written and directed by Thor: Ragnarok’s Taika Waititi, it co-stars this year’s Oscar-winner Sam Rockwell and Scarlett Johansson.

Not that you should expect McKenzie to suddenly go all Hollywood under this new-found attention. Acting is about approaching her characters “genuinely and truthfully”, she says, just as she did on Granik’s film. “It’s just living through someone else and experiencing their way of life and their views and beliefs.”

It might make Granik groan again, but McKenzie certainly leaves her trace for all to see.

‘Leave No Trace’ is in cinemas now