Debra Granik's first movie, a short entitled Snake Feed, won Best Short at the Sundance Film Festival in 1998. In 2004, she won the Dramatic Directing Award at Sundance for her first feature-length movie, Down to the Bone.Her second feature, Winter's Bone, starred Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes. It won the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic Film at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, and it received four 2011 Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor.
For Winter's Bone, Debra cast many of the supporting roles with first-time actors from the surrounding area in Missouri, and all of the homes on screen were local homes - no sets were built for the movie. She kept most of the aesthetics of the homes in which they were shooting, and many of the mementos were contributed by people in the community.
Photograph copyright Larry F. Levenson. All rights reserved.
