In October of 2021, Amazon Studios announced that it had acquired Trevor Beck Frost and Melissa Lesh’s Wildcat for a price close to $20 million, which is a staggering amount for a document of this nature. Produced by 30WEST (“Tiger King,” “Flee”), the film tells the story of former British soldier Harry Turner and conservationist Samantha Wicker, who help heal each other while caring for a young wildcat deep in the Peruvian rainforest.
This is Frost and Lesh’s first feature film. Frost comes from a still photography background, with work published in National Geographic and The New York Times, while Lesh has previously worked with short films. The documentary is gaining momentum on the brink of awards season, having recently been nominated for two IDA Documentary Awards for Editing (Lesh, Joshua Altman, David Zieff, Ben Gold) and Score (Patrick Jonsson).
Amazon has already launched an FYC page for the film, which includes several categories including Best Documentary Feature, Direction and Original Song by Fleet Foxes “A Sky Like I Never Seen,” featuring Brazilian singer Tim Bernards.
“Wildcat” played to packed audiences in IDFA’s Best of Fests series, which also includes other major 2022 titles like Sunak Sen’s “All That Breathes” and Kathryn Ferguson’s “Nothing Compares.” While at IDFA, Frost and Lesh sat down with Variety to discuss their collaboration, their time in Peru and how Wildcat changed Harry and Samantha’s lives.
“Wildcat” (Courtesy of Amazon Studios)
This is your first advantage. why now?
Frost: Melissa has loved documentaries for as long as we’ve known each other and we’ve always been trying to convince me that documentaries are the hottest thing going on in storytelling right now. So I’ve been slowly trolling because of Melissa, and at the same time, I’ve been getting frustrated with still photography because magazines and newspapers are disappearing and there’s so little collaboration. I accidentally run into Harry and Samantha, our main characters, in the hotel lobby; They showed me a hard drive full of footage of the cat, and I knew immediately there was a lovely movie to be made.
why: I’ve been making short films for about a decade now, and you never really know what’s going to excite you or challenge you the most. I had a teacher who said, “It’s not precious because what you’re doing now is building your skill set and when the story lands, you’ll be ready,” and I feel like that’s been going on with me for the past decade. When the story found us, I felt ready to pick it up.
There are plenty of nuanced initial scenes of emotional turmoil in “Wildcat.” How did you approach the ethics of what to shoot and what to ultimately share in the film?
Frost: We lived on a very small wooden platform, just the four of us. We bathed together, we cooked together, we went to bed together and what happened is we became a family very quickly and because we were family, photography became second nature. When you watch someone’s home videos, there’s a lot of familiarity between them, because families let their guard down around each other. Strangers make you pay attention. In addition, we had no distractions, no cell phones, no internet – all we had was each other, so we had plenty of opportunities to just talk, and this gave way to an intimacy in which we were able to gain permission from both of us. Pictures of some of these most difficult moments.
why: People have asked us many times if we think our presence and cameras are potentially dangerous to the situation and our answer is no. We actually felt that the camera creates a certain aura of responsibility. One of the main things about helping people with mental health struggles is just being there, right? So our presence, our presence with the camera meant that Harry felt a certain responsibility to us.
How long did you spend in Peru with Harry and Samantha?
Frost: I did 180 days and Melissa did almost 160 days.
You mentioned how strong the connection between you and the people is. Why the creative choice to remove yourselves from the film?
Frost: We filmed our calls with them, I filmed myself on several occasions just talking to Harry and explaining to him that I care about him and worry about him. We tried to incorporate that into the movie, we tried it and it just never felt right, so we ended up removing it.
Did you consult any mental health experts to deal with Harry’s crisis?
Frost: I have been suffering from depression and anxiety for a decade now, and have been seeing a psychiatrist and psychiatrist. I also have several friends who work in the mental health field, one of whom is a very knowledgeable mental health reporter. So I was able to consult not only with my doctors but with some of these other people.
why: We have a full list of Mental Health Counselors too.
Frost: They came at the stage of liberation.
why: It was very important to offer the cuts to the experts in the field because the last thing we want to do is piss someone off or cause them to cause more harm to someone who is struggling. There were important points of feedback, which we learned and adapted to and made sure to get a few things out so the movie didn’t do any harm.
“Wildcat” (Courtesy of Amazon Studios)
The movie was picked up by Amazon in a record-breaking deal with millionaires and is already being speculated as a major contender during awards season. How do you feel?
why: overwhelming [laughs]. We would never expect to be here. The probability of what happened to our movie is so low that you can’t count on it at all. We didn’t go into this movie thinking that this was going to be the outcome, and in some ways, there’s something really beautiful about it because we worked with Harry and Samantha in a kind of collaborative and naive way and now we get to share it with the world.
Frost: Seems like it was all worth it, you know? Harry and Sam took a risk with us, and they had other people approach them about the footage. What we’re most proud of is that we shared it equally with Harry and Samantha as producers and as producers, they get shares. Samantha worked for seven years and never paid herself. The most money Harry ever made was $13,000 in the army. Now, because of this deal, they are both set up for life, both able to devote themselves entirely to their conservation work.
Are you already thinking about the next step?
why: Yes, we started our next movie! I won’t say much about it but it’s a similar kind of human/animal story. As with “Wildcat,” one of our goals is to create a very straightforward driving story, but delve into much deeper themes. We are really passionate about the intersection of nature and humans, so our goal is to bring in people who may not be interested in wildlife.
Frost: There are very few films about human relationship with nature, so we see an opening and we want to spend most of our careers telling stories trying to improve the way conservation storytelling affects what happens in some of these places around the world. Globalism.
“Wildcat” has a limited theatrical release on December 21st. Prime Video arrives on December 30th.
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