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“The Best is Always Zero Budget”: David Verbeek on Tribeca 2025 Premiere The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard
Jessica Reynolds, Marie Jung and Nicholas Pinnock in The Woilf, The Fox, and the Leopard In a contemporary take on Werner Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard depicts a woman who lives amongst wolves being whisked away and plunged into human society. Director David Verbeek presents this jarring story as a kind of apocalyptic fairytale, in which a feral woman learns what it means to be human while humanity itself is bracing for the end of the world as they know it. Mostly set on a repurposed offshore oil rig, the film explores how the interests of men and nature inevitably clash in the face of impending climate catastrophe.
An ambitious apocalyptic sci-fi fairytale, co-produced by six participating countries, starring Kneecap’s Jessica Reynolds—in every sense of the word, Verbeek’s ninth feature film is his biggest to date. Nonetheless, The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard is a natural extension of a thematically coherent oeuvre through which the Dutch screenwriter and director explores the 21st’s century prevailing isolation, estrangement and disorientation. With internationally recognised films such as R U There, which played Cannes’ Un Certain Regard in 2010, and the Toronto International Film Festival-premiering Full Contact (2015), Verbeek is the rare Dutch auteur of his generation that has found a global platform for his cinematic output. The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard is anticipating its world premiere in the International Narrative Competition of Tribeca Film Festival.
With his latest, Verbeek hones in on a central idea that ties all his films together: the way that the stories we tell ourselves shape our reality. This manifests itself in the story-within-the-story construct of the film, narrated in Japanese by arthouse auteur Naomi Kawase. Who is the author of our life story? Verbeek seems to ask here, as he gleefully tears apart the narrative construct that the film initially opens with. In an in-depth conversation with Filmmaker, Verbeek opens up about the recurring existential themes within his impressive oeuvre, exploring humanities trauma’s and how working with wolves influenced his approach to filmmaking.
Filmmaker: With your previous feature Dead & Beautiful (2021), you portrayed the mega wealthy as blood-sucking vampires who drain the rest of the world of its financial and natural resources. The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard is an even more apocalyptic film concerned with scarcity and climate catastrophe. How do you see the relation between these two films?
Verbeek: I see why you would make that connection, but to be honest, I mostly see similarities in the way my films are about people who live in illusionary worlds. R U There, for instance, is about a guy who retreats from his life and finds a level of control in the video game he is highly skilled in. When he witnesses an accident on the streets, he doesn’t know how to cope with this violent reality. An inverse of that is seen in Full Contact, in which a drone pilot kills people while being in this highly mediated, remote environment. Because of this removal, he goes on this inward journey of trauma processing to cross the bridge from unreality to reality again. Meanwhile, Dead & Beautiful explores how ultra-rich people are so bored that they conceive all these role-playing games, à la Marie Antoinette who played pretend-farmer with her wealthy friends. All these characters inhabit metaphorical bubbles that allow them to break contact with the real world.
Filmmaker: The girl who lives amongst wolves in The Wolf, The Fox & The Leopard and is dragged into human society feels like a natural extension of that.
Verbeek: Ultimately, all my films are about the tension between people living in their own bubbles and the sensorial viscerality of life itself. What ties all these things together is how language allows us to construct narratives around ourselves. Essentially, all the characters of my films retreat into bubbles, because they tell themselves some kind of story. For instance, our protagonist in Full Contact might say to himself: “I am just a drone pilot. If I kill people with a drone, I am just following orders. I’m just executing commands on a screen. It has nothing to do with me.” But the interesting psychological mechanism, of course, is that it truly has something to do with him. Sooner or later, this sense of guilt will always manifest itself. You can’t choose to completely rid yourself off of it. These are the kind of mechanisms I love to explore.
Filmmaker: Where does this fascination with human beings isolating themselves from their immediate surroundings come from?
Verbeek: Your question makes me realise that even the first film I ever made, which I wrote while I was still in high school, was concerned with this notion that something big was lacking in life. Even as a Dutch teenager, I could sense a hole in modern life, like some cohesive tissue was missing in our capitalist society. I always wondered how and with what that hole could be filled. What could essentially connect people again? So there was something a bit non-Dutch and non-conformist about me. Not that this makes me particularly special, but it did propel me towards bigger philosophical questions.
Filmmaker: Films like Shanghai Trance (2008), How To Describe a Cloud (2013) and An Impossibly Small Object (2018) take place in the bustling cities of Shanghai or Taipei. Could you say that these overwhelming metropolitan environments in Asia were a better canvas to explore such questions on an intensified scale?
Verbeek: That’s exactly it. I was already exploring how the Netherlands was trying to fill its spiritual vacancy when my sociological interests turned towards East-Asia, where cities were changing so quickly that it estranged a lot of its inhabitants. In the Netherlands, you see this slow process of build-up and recovery after WWII, which still explains some of our societal ills. I was keen to explore an environment where those growing pains are much more severe. This is what initially brought me to mainland China. There I also found a film language that more closely adheres to these big questions.
Filmmaker: These isolating bubbles always clash in your films with more primal and immediate visceral experiences. Your films always try to capture these desorienting sensorial experiences. Where does this come from?
Verbeek: With films like Beat (2004) and Shanghai Trance, I initially looked from the outside in how people relate to society. Gradually, though, I got more and more interested in consciousness itself, and essentially the impossibility to truly grasp what consciousness means. Cinema is the ideal medium to explore that question as it is the synthesis of so many different art practices. Cinema can be a pure and total experience, and perhaps can be the closest replication of what happens within our consciousness. This greatly informed my style.
Filmmaker: Can you explain how that concretely manifests itself when you’re working on a film?
Verbeek: In the case of Full Contact, I was interested in the ways a drone pilot processes his guilt-driven PTSD. I am convinced a classical three-act structure is unable to truly capture this process. So, you start to wonder: what’s a proper style that captures this person’s interior? That made me think about the ways in which trauma-related guilt works. Of course, I do research into the subject, but what’s much more productive for me is to investigate how I experience things personally on a much smaller scale. One example is when I once almost got hit by a car while I was biking through Amsterdam. The car driver simply started shouting at me, calling me a jerk and saying it was my fault that I almost got hit. And I’m just standing there, startled and thinking “hat the fuck” before I proceed with my journey. The rest of this bike ride, I’m stuck in my brain thinking of different scenarios of what I actually wanted to say and do. I keep telling myself these stories until my brain has enough and is satisfied with the narratives I spun out for myself. Only then am I allowed to stop thinking about it. This is how guilt trauma works: it’s revisiting this one situation time and time again. So sure, this is some banal experience out of my own ordinary life, but I can sublimate that onto the psyche of the character I’m writing for my film.
Filmmaker: Still, there is a huge difference between a drone pilot remotely killing dozens of people in the Middle East and a filmmaker almost getting hit by a car in Amsterdam.
Verbeek: The crazy thing is that at some point during the editing of Full Contact, I invited an actual drone pilot to watch the film with me. He was completely perplexed when I showed him the film. He looked at me and asked: “How did you get into my brain?” It turned out that there were a lot of uncanny coincidences. Just like the protagonist in my film, he started free fighting. He had also dated a stripper, and worked as a baggage handler at an airport. Sure, these are all circumstantial examples, but he also confirmed that he mentally kept searching for a confrontation with his victims. That’s why he picked up boxing and ended up as a cage fighter. So, again, my stupid bike story helped me to tell this story on a much larger scale.
Filmmaker: You have already worked with mosaic-like stories before, but the narrative-within-narrative of The Wolf, the Fox, and the Leopard operates on an even greater scale. How did you approach this multi-layered story?
Verbeek: This was one of my more complicated films to make as the narrative operates on many levels. We start as a fairytale narrated in Japanese,then follow what seems to be our first protagonist, Dylan. He comes across as the archetypal white male leading man; you follow him along in his search for meaning in life, but before you know it, he gets eaten by wolves. Essentially, he is the unreliable narrator. The film is not about him, it’s about nature, and specifically about this girl that lives in nature. It wasn’t an easy task to strike a balance on the level of screenplay, decoupage, mise-en-scène and editing. The biggest challenge resided in the art of compression. The first edit of the film, was three hours and twenty minutes long. So for me, it was a huge rise to the occasion to learn how to compress things even more. This is where the contributions of my editor Matthieu Laclau were indispensable. Matthieu is a French editor living in Taiwan and has worked with some of the masters of cinema, like Jia Zhangke. He really helped me to mess around with the flow of time in the film, using montage as a way to craft a fairytale out of all the material. Thanks to him, the film reaches a level of poeticism and musicality that ultimately fits the story.
Filmmaker: I’m also curious about the way you wanted the film to look, as there is a startling tension between these fantastic storylines and the stark realism of the image.
Verbeek: This was, again, a long process of research that I mostly conducted with my cinematographer Frank van den Eeden. First and foremost, we were considering which camera we would utilize. We settled on the ALEXA 35 with its 4.6K Super 35 sensor. It delivers incredibly strong images, with rich textures, deep qualities and a lot of latitude in the darker areas. It gives a sense of textural authenticity that was necessary to construct the image around this fairytale. Especially when you’re in the forest, with a pack of wolves, and can really study the fur of the animals and the hair on the body of our protagonist, it gives a rawness to the image that we desired. If you’re peeling away the layers of a fairytale until you end up with its raw core, the medium itself shouldn’t be too fairytale-like. In this case you should refrain from black-and-white or ultra-saturated imagery. You need a sense of veracity in the film stock itself.
Filmmaker: This contrast between fairytale and realism also expresses itself in the way this girl is whisked from nature and plunged into human society. How did you formally play with this disruption of her natural environment?
Verbeek: Compared to normal human beings, very different things constitute as terrifying for her. For instance, she is quite accustomed to a level of physical violence considering she has lived among wolves. Undoubtedly, she occasionally got bit if she wanted a piece of meat that she didn’t have the right to because of her lower position in the hierarchy of the pack. Much scarier for her are the ways in which people fight, which is with words. So, you have this dinner table scene on the oil rig, where her “parents” are fighting with words, looks and tiny gestures. For her, this is much worse compared to when her parents would simply beat each other. We chose to let this scene play out in one long take that gradually brings us closer to her. Her acting here is brilliant, but behind the scenes, this is a terrifying shot to film. Are you really going to skip on filming closer coverage, just in case you want to combine elements from different takes? The risk is that you’re stuck with a shot that doesn’t quite work in itself, and here’s where I felt the support of my incredible crew. Frank especially inspired a lot of confidence. He just said “Let’s go for it and dedicate all our energy to this one rider.” Because of him, I dared to film this scene like that.
Filmmaker: I assume working so closely with wolves informed your ideas about the relationships between human beings and nature. So, what was the process like of filming these animals?
Verbeek: What I really like about working with animals is that they don’t act, meaning you have to work with them in completely different manners which requires a more open-ended approach. We worked with a pack of wolves that belongs to a family living in the forests outside of Hamburg. I’d say these wolves aren’t dangerous at all, but they’re not as easy as dogs. The main difference between dogs and wolves is that wolves aren’t man’s best friend. A wolf will never do anything specifically for you. It doesn’t crave your love or affection. So, you need to manipulate a wolf in completely different ways. One way is to utilize their hierarchical position within the pack. If we wanted a wolf to growl, we put the alpha of the pack behind the camera and held up a smaller bulldog just underneath the camera, which would trigger the growling. You can also work with food. For instance, in the scene in which Dylan gets devoured, we used metal pins to pin meat into the ground, then I tasked the actor to try to stop the wolves from getting to the meat. If you film that from a couple of directions, in the editing it will look like he gets eaten alive. Basically, whenever we could, we would try to film these wolves as naturalistic as possible, as if we were shooting a nature documentary. The animal trainers were completely shocked by this. They had never seen a film crew work with their wolves in an almost documentary kind of way.
Filmmaker: Speaking about casting, I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you how you got Naomi Kawase to play the Japanese narrator of the film—a character, I might add, that gets eaten alive.
Verbeek: I always knew that the film should be narrated in Japanese for a very simple reason: I love the film The Taste of Tea by Katsuhito Ishii. It’s an incredibly funny and absurdist film with a narrative approach that also works on some meta-level. When I was in Rotterdam for the film festival in 2022, I heard that Naomi Kawase was also there with Official Film of the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 Side A. I thought. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if the author of the story in the film is portrayed by a genuine auteur of cinema?” So, my producers arranged a meeting with her and I pitched the story. She loved it but also said, “I don’t want to be eaten”’ It took some convincing that the author of the story in the film has to be eaten, and she eventually accepted. We had a good connection while shooting the film. It was a pleasure to work with her.
Filmmaker: You made your debut feature Beat on a budget of 500 euros, and had its world premiere on International Film Festival Rotterdam. Meanwhile, recent films like Dead & Beautiful and The Wolf, The Fox and The Leopard are costly projects backed by many international co-producing parties. In between these extremes, you have made a wide array of films that differ in productional scope and budget. How do you navigate these varying financial and practical constraints within your oeuvre?
Verbeek: Whenever I start with a film, I always ask myself first: is this something that I need to make out of some sort of raw urgency? Will waiting make the film worse? Do I need to make it now? If the answer to these questions is “Yes,” I will make something small, because you know that producing it on a bigger scale will always alter the fabric of the project. It just becomes a different movie. In the Netherlands at least, it’s also inevitable that once your film’s budget is over 5 million euros, you are simply writing twenty versions of the screenplay over the course of multiple years. This is just the way it goes when you are navigating film funds here. With this film, it was quite evident that its complexity required a bigger production, and that simply takes time. One major downside of such a complex co-production is the spending obligations you have. We had six participating countries on this project, meaning you have to spend your money on very specific things, which narrows a lot of options down for you. It’s a convoluted and often frustrating puzzle. And, of course, you are inevitably spending money in places where everything is insanely expensive and the crew is very costly. That ends up translating into less shooting days, which ups the pressure on set. So if you really ask me what kind of working mode I prefer, I’d say working on a small budget. Or rather, not even a small budget, because little money usually amounts to nothing. The best is always zero budget. That’s simply the most beautiful way to work if you can afford it. When you are able to invest your own time and work at your own leisure, the risk is greater, but the results are at least completely your own.
