Producer Kat Mansoor may be a self-confessed “urban girl who didn’t spend much time in nature growing up”, but together with filmmaker Andrea Arnold and DOP Magda Kowalczyk, was prepared to get up close and personal to shoot the bovine beasts featured in Cow, which screens Out of Competition at Cannes.
Kate Mansoor’s admiration for director Andrea Arnold is evident from the start during her interview with Business Doc Europe. “I always loved the way she gives people a chance to be seen properly, people that sometimes are ignored or kind of put to put to the side or discounted in life,” Mansoor underlines. “I value the way that she shows people being, rather than, trying to make big statements about people.”
So when Arnold came to her with the idea to shoot a feature-length doc about cows (and this of course long pre-dated the likes of Victor Kossakovsky’s porcine-themed festival favourite Gunda) Mansoor immediately “got it.”
“I just thought, yeah, I can see how her style, what she’s got to say about the world, how she looks sometimes at the underdog, I guess, could really work for a film like this. And I thought what a brilliant challenge, and as a producer you are always looking for challenges or a vision,” the producer says.
Arnold describes her film within the press notes as “an endeavour to consider cows. To move us closer to them. To see both their beauty and the challenge of their lives. Not in a romantic way but in a real way. It’s a film about one dairy cow’s reality and acknowledging her great service to us. When I look at Luma, our cow, I see the whole world in her.”
Mansoor picks up the theme: “Cows provide a great service to all of us. They work to produce milk or meat for consumption. They’re strong, hard workers that really haven’t chosen that life.”
She further elaborates on the enormous appeal of documentaries about animals to both industry and public alike. “Andrea makes art and often money isn’t really a conversation that we ever have, but obviously from a producing point of view, we love animals as people. Basically we’re not the only species on the planet, right. And ultimately we have to make room for these stories because we know how important animals in nature are to us all. So it makes sense that these films get attention, not just Cow…they [animals] are living, breathing aspects of the world. It makes complete sense to me that they [animal docs] sell, as we’re all connected to them. It makes absolute sense to me that they have audience appeal.”
Does Arnold’s experience (and acclaim) as a director of fiction films inform her approach to documentary. “I just don’t know if she would necessarily see it [Cow] as strict documentary,” Mansoor answers. “I think it’s kind of a mixture of an essay film and close observation, but also deep drama. There’s lots of drama, and she was very aware of all of those dramatic points that would come out. My perception of her is that she sees drama in the everyday. I think that’s what’s really special about her, looking at a very small thing, but seeing it’s poetry and it’s drama. And that’s something that I think absolutely crosses fiction and documentary.”
Mansoor adds that Arnold had a clear vision from the outset about the film she wanted to make and surrounded herself with the personnel who could realise her vision (including fearless DOP, Magda Kowalczyk, who would happily wade into a field with a hundred or more large, and potentially skittish, heads of cattle).
“It makes life a lot easier when you have a director that is so resolute about what she wants to do, and life can go any which way from that point. You know, you’re not trying to construct anything. You’re just literally being part of the experience.”
“For me as a producer, I think maybe just knowing what Andrea’s vision was so early in the production was really fantastic. It was a gift, definitely a gift,” Mansoor ends.
Cow is a Halcyon Pictures and BBC Film production.
