Brit Marling, between diving dumpster and Hollywood.
I had not heard of her name until one of the editors of MOTB proposed I write about her. The editor, who is also a friend, had said: “she reminds me of you”.
Ok, this girl is tall, blond and has blue eyes… but I believe what she meant had more to do with the kind of girl Brit (named after her Norwegian maternal great-grandmother) is. So, I started to read about her life, and began to identify a little with the way she tries to get out of her comfort zone in order to search for her real purpose in life. Defining herself as a “tree climber” on her Twitter account, well, that really got my attention.
Brit Marling was born in Chicago (USA) in 1983; she is a writer, producer, director and actress. From what I read she comes across as a sort of anti-ingenue in the Hollywood of today. After attending Georgetown University and securing an internship at Goldman Sachs, she decided to audition for some bad movies, until she realized that to get better roles she would need to write the scripts herself. So she took up this challenge, helped by two of her very best friends; cinema directors Zal Batmanglij and Mike Cahill, she co-wrote and also starred in some very cerebral movies, includingAnother Earth, Sound of My Voice and the recent The East.
In The East, Marling plays Sarah Moss, a private security-firm investigator who infiltrates a group of anarchists. Led by the charismatic Benji (Alexander Skarsgård) and Izzy (Ellen Page), the group carries out attacks on various corrupt corporate entities (big pharma, oil companies and other polluters, etc.), including some of Sarah’s firm’s clients. Once she gets to know the members of the group, she begins to question who’s really right: the anarchy-minded activists or the corporate criminals whom they target.
“The idea of making a thriller that’s about the sort of feelings, energy and questions of this time seemed really appealing to us” Marling explained during one interview. She really hopes her movies get people thinking and talking with others about whatever the films means to them. Apparently all her films aim to mix modern realities in a way that also pushes boundaries, treads on controversial ground. And that’s certainly the case in The East.
In fact, the origin of this movie began years ago when Marling and Batmanglij (director of the film) spent a summer ‘on the road’ together. Travelling without any money, they met up with a group of freegans*, who inspired the anarchist characters in The East. Both friends were really moved by the bravery of these people, who, from the same generation as them yet intentionally dropping out of conventional society, were so open to teaching things (diving dumpsters for example). ”When you dive a dumpster for the first time, you’re thinking what everybody thinks: this is weird, it’s gross and it doesn’t make sense… Then you realize that there’s a lot of really perfectly good food in there” Marling recalls.
Based on this experience, Marling and Batmanglii felt inspired to write a movie in this same spirit.
Based on this experience, Marling and Batmanglii felt inspired to write a movie in this same spirit.
These days she thinks it is stupid not to dive a dumpster while there’s a huge percentage of population living below the poverty line, but at the same time acknowledges that dumpster diving isn’t for everyone.
Despite (or perhaps because…) of her unusual path, this tree climber girl is actually in a growing career. Nevertheless she seems to be very careful about success. Commenting that “it can be troubling and dangerous”, Marling prefers not to take to it too seriously because at the end of the day it is just making movies, and what she really loves is living in a real world, not in a pretend one.
–What´s next for Marling: she plays Abraham Lincoln’s mother in “The Green Blade Rises,” one of a group of women left to fend for themselves in the Civil War drama “The Keeping Room,” and stars in sci-fi drama, “I Origins”, directed by “Another Earth” director, Mike Cahill.
*Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources.
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