Ray Giarratanahas had an interesting trajectory through the movie industry, supervising the visual effects for such critical darlings asThe Life AquaticandI Heart Huckabeeswhile slowly making his way to the director’s chair through commercials. Now, he’s written and directed his first feature film,The Tiger Rising, a family picture about the ways people deal with trauma differently in their lives. Despite his background with technology, he’s always viewed effects as a property of storytelling, which has helped him along his way toward telling this tale, an adaptation of thebeloved book by Kate DiCamillo.
I started back in the early computer graphics days when it was all black magic to everybody, and I kind of came up doing visual effects for commercials and later films. I kind of always found that I was able to connect with a director, because I thought of things from the story point of view, you know, and certainly how that applies then to the visual effects portion. You know if I just talked technical, that wasn’t helping, but if lwe talked about story, and we talked about character and beats, and just more filmmaking techniques, then that was always a better way to get to what we needed to do, so I always thought of myself that way, rather than a technical geek […] I didn’t want to specifically do a quote unquote visual effects film. I wanted to really tell a rich story with rich characters. […] I guess I didn’t want to wow, an audience with visual effects. I really wanted to speak through on this from a character and story point of view. And that was certainly the most important part to me.
While there are a few of Giarratana’ssignature whimsical effectsin the film, they are entirely subordinate to the characters and the narrative. In the film, Rob, a young boy who has recently lost his mother and is living in a motel with his struggling father, discovers a caged tiger in the woods belonging to the cruel motel owner (played by Dennis Quaid, who relishes the devilish role). He develops a friendship with a young girl of a decidedly different social class who is also dealing with trauma in a specific way, being unable to deal with her parents' divorce.
It’s a simple story, and yet it’s got so many layers in it that it found really intriguing. Kate DiCamillo, the author, told also a universal story here. You know, this isn’t about kids. This is about hurt and pain and how we get through that, and that’s universal. Kate and I chose to tell the story through the eyes of an imaginative 10-year-old boy, which I thought was really clever on her part, you know, because that kind of opens up our world cinematically, but it also speaks to adults, because we all deal with these things. So, I told the cast and the crew early on, guys, we’re not making a kid’s movie. Get that in your head right now. We’re making a family film. We’re making something that’s going to speak to kids and adults alike, because this is something we all deal with, one way or another.
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The film navigates the traumas of each character (including a motel maid quietly played byQueen Latifah, who reveals her character’s pain beneath her strength with small gestures) as represented by how they relate to the caged tiger. The young girl Sistine (played by Madeline Mills) is immediately desperate to release the animal; Quaid’s motel owner belittles it and keeps it caged; Rob’s father remains willfully ignorant of it; Rob feeds it but wants to talk about it with others and, eventually, needs to release the tiger as a symbolic gesture for letting go of his own deep pain.
Basically, everybody’s dealing with something in their own way. Rob, in particular, he’s dealing with the loss of his mom, and he goes inward, he kind of shuts down, shuts out the world a bit and goes to his imagination. Sistine, on the other hand, she’s dealing with the divorce of her parents, and she doesn’t know how to handle that either. But she definitely erupts. She instead goes outward, she’s throwing punches […] She just doesn’t know how to process it. You know? And when we made Queen Latifah’s character, we don’t state it specifically, but she’s been through a lot in her life, and this is the way she deals with things. Robert Senior, […] the loss of his wife had to have been huge. So, he’s left now to deal with the young boy, and he’s having a hard time connecting. You know, it doesn’t make him a bad father, either.
Everyone carries their pain differently, andThe Tiger Risingcreates empathy for a large swath of classes and races, young and old, teaching the audience how to relate to people when their trauma often makes this difficult. The film stars Christian Convery (who leads the seriesSweet Toothon Netflix),American Idolsinger Katherine McPhee, and the aforementioned Latifah, who all locate their traumas well. The only character in the film who could be seen as villainous is Quaid’s, who takes a hard turn here from how he’s typically used by directors, but goes all-in with the character’s menacing, ridiculous disposition.
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Dennis, in the family films that he’s made over the years, he’s usually this, you know, all-American Heart of Gold kind of guy. And then we asked him to play the quote unquote villain in this film, and, yeah, he had a good time with it. I can’t tell you how many days we passed each other on set, between scenes or something, and he’d just, like, smack me in the arm and just say, Ray, I love this character, man.
A film that deals with trauma in a way that is suitable for the whole family may be an important, cathartic choice for viewers coming out of (at least in some ways) the COVID-19 years, where the world experienced a kind of collective trauma, somethingmany recent films have addressed. Giarratana is certainly cognizant of this and hopes his film can help audiences through some of this pandemic’s pain.
I think this is coming out at an interesting time. We have been dealing with COVID and all its complications now for two years, and I think that has left a lot of people with emotions on edge. How do we handle lots of different things? And I think this kind of speaks to that. You know, this is a good time to like talk about feelings of hurt and frustrations, and how we keep going. I think what I’m hoping audiences will get from the film is, you know, we all going through something, but we don’t all handle it the same way. Maybe if we give each other a little extra empathy, a little extra space and understanding, it’d be helpful for everybody. That’s what I’m looking for.
The Coronavirus pandemic greatly affectedThe Tiger Risingitself, putting the film into the same kind of fluctuating space which has caused distributors to hold off releasing certain films based on when an actual audience would see them in theaters.Top Gun: Maverick, for instance, hasoscillated between release datesfor nearly three years now, andThe Tiger Risingis no different.
COVID definitely affected as we were just starting to edit it, then COVID happened. It slowed our post-production down a bit, but then it certainly changed and affected the whole release of the film, because we were probably planning to release it in like September 2020. But nobody knew what theaters were doing then, nobody knew what to do about anything. So we kind of hung in there and just kind of waited a little. […] We were just looking for enough of an audience out there, because it’s a special film with a special message, and we wanted to ensure to get it out there [at the right time].
The time has finally come forRay Giarratana’sdebut feature to hit theaters, and hopefully, families can see it together and foster the much-needed sense of empathy and grace which the director and his film encourage so dearly.
