By In Wildlife, Montana is burning. Satanic orange flames swallow acres of trees while men are trucked in to tackle the blaze. But where Paul Dano's directorial debut truly finds its heat is a few miles away, in a newly rented house where marital tension is slowly burning.
Dano's acting career was kickstarted by his performance in the runaway success, Little Miss Sunshine. In the 2006 film he played wary teenager Dwayne who, in one memorable scene, discovers he is colourblind, crushing his lifelong dream of becoming a test pilot.
That was followed by Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood in 2007, where Dano took on quivering preacher Eli Sunday. Dano was originally cast as Eli's enterprising brother Paul Sunday - a much smaller role - but Anderson fired the actor intended for Eli and cast Dano as both siblings. Despite having just four days to prepare, Dano's performance and on-screen chemistry with Daniel Day-Lewis saw him earn rave reviews and award nominations.
Since then his roles have included child-kidnapping outsider Alex Jones in Denis Villeneuve's thriller Prisoners, a racist psychopath in 12 Years a Slave, young Brian Wilson in Beach Boys biopic Love & Mercy and the steely leader of an animal rights group in Netflix's Okja.
Next month he will release his directorial debut, Wildlife which has screened at Sundance, Cannes and Toronto film festivals and is already generating Oscars buzz. Adapted from Richard Ford’s novel of the same name and set in the 1960s, Wildlife finds Jerry Brinson (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his wife Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) looking for a fresh start with their son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) in what we sense has been a long line of do-overs.
Jerry fails to find work after being fired from his job at the local golf club and, after the embarrassment of accepting his wife's help weighs on him, he leaves them to fight forest fires in rural Montana for a dollar a day wage.
"His pride got hurt, that happens sometimes," Jeanette explains to her boy with the same weary and glazed look that lingers on her face throughout the film.
Dano fell in love with Richard Ford's novel after reading the opening paragraph in a bookshop. "I had a very uncanny personal reaction to it," Dano says, in town for London Film Festival and to speak at Esquire Townhouse. "Like with all great writers, it feels like it’s written for you."
Though his eccentric characters have often had a pronounced physicality to them, Dano himself has an almost unnerving stillness. He speaks in quiet considered sentences, often pausing in the middle to check what he's saying cannot be misunderstood.
"I think it is first [of all] about a family," he says of Wildlife. "A mother, father and son all coming of age and [about] masculinity, The American Dream and exploring this woman who we let be very messy and fraught.
"Carey felt like she doesn’t often get to play a woman who gets to be messy because people don’t want to see that. Whereas men can be lionised for their problems - they’re applauded."
Mulligan’s Jeanette is both heartbreaking and enraging to watch as she flits from joyful abandon to wild anger. Each emotion that overpowers her plays out in the corner of her mouth. It's a hell of a performance.
"All these brilliant [female] actors need a vessel for all parts of them, not just the parts we want to see," Dano says thoughtfully.
Though the family are pulled apart by what we would now call 'toxic masculinity' and Jerry's immense pride causing his fall, the film's most interesting observations are made of both Jeanette and Ed and the careful dance they play around Jerry.
"There’s parts of you which get repressed if you have a kid when you’re 20 and you’re following your husband around," Dano says. "I think in a way those feelings come roaring out instead of being dealt with in a nice way."
"It wasn't even talked about back then," the director says of the way women were trapped in marriages. "At least we're starting to have a conversation about it now, but for her there was no lifeline."
"It's felt surprisingly modern in recent weeks," he pauses, alluding to the political situation back in his home country where the gender wars are raging like the fires in his film, "and not in a good way."
While Jerry and Jeanette are the two rods which spark drama, it is the boy caught between them emotionally -and often literally - through which we witness the breakdown of a marriage. He is continually present in adult situations, walking in on the debris of his mother's strewn underwear or tearing his eyes away from the window as she kisses another man.
"The mystery of who our parents are is one of the key feelings I wanted to explore," Dano says. "Discovering that your parents are people with a past life and problems. One day you’re thrust into adulthood. You wake up and suddenly things are different."
Joe is the silent observer, watching his father get fired with words he cannot quite hear but still understands the meaning of, or seeing his mother collapsed in bed after his father has left.
It's a beautifully sparse film, with this small fragile family unit contrasted against sweeping vistas and glowing orange skies thanks to the remarkable cinematography of Diego Garcia. Dano adapted the script with his partner, the screenwriter and actor Zoe Kazan, who, in a pleasing bit of symmetry, he met while filming Ruby Sparks, helmed by directing duo and couple Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.
I ask what he's noticed in moving from actor to director, and he gives the idea a moment's consideration before smiling. "Just how important the actors are," he laughs. "I don’t think I ever realised it but as a director they’re my conduit to the audience. I was so amazed by these guys that I thought, 'oh acting, yeah that’s hard'."
Dano won't be giving up acting soon but says he wants to continue directing. "I can’t wait to make another film, so I’m definitely going to. But I don’t know when that will be."
In one of Wildlife's most powerful moments Jeanette drives Joe to see the fire and they stand in front of the inferno Jerry has willingly thrown himself into. "It's one of those 'welcome to the real world' moments," Dano says. "She’s saying he’s not a hero and he could die. He’s risking his life, but for what?"
'Wildlife' is released 9 November
