Life Imitates Art in the Delightfully Disturbing, Coming-of-Age Fantasy ‘A Wonderful Way with Dragons’

by Lianna Albrizio for Winter Film Festival
See the North American Premiere of the feature film A Wonderful Way with Dragons on February 21 @9:10PM at LOOK Cinemas (657 West 57th Street) as part of New York City’s 13th Annual Winter Film Festival. Tickets now on sale!

Director Define Paolini’s debut feature film’s on- and-off-screen chaos in getting a movie out about the madness tied to the isolation of a pandemic will make viewers rethink the meaning of virtue.

In Delfine Paolini’s coming-of-age dark fairytale, A Wonderful Way with Dragons, a thick mist enshrouds a mysterious body of water whose path is hidden beneath a hard light — almost as if God himself blessed this picturesque utopia.

A blanket of sunshine casts a golden glow over mature green trees, illuminating a nondescript white house with dirty siding. The quietude is reflected in a bird’s flapping wings and panting dog.

A child — one of six ranging in age from 10 to teen who inhabit this lush island of greenery and river — enshrouds a knife with his breath before wiping it clean to reveal his eyes.

“Mother, are you the blue in the forest wind”? the narrator, Bee (Violet McGraw), clothed in a red gown, sweetly asks, rhetorically. “The river is red mother. The day is a hunted thing.”

Though the uncertainty in that eventuality is appalling, there’s no sense of time in this serene paradise. The days, however, are numbered for the outside world as a deadly pandemic has claimed the lives of some 100 million people. The children were ferried over to this safe haven and cradled by none other than mother nature and its four elements — fire, air, earth and water — to keep them thriving and out of harm’s way. (This, and Bee’s daily prayers.) While the peace in isolation can be an antidote to a troubled mind, (that, and a bag of knucklebones) this surreal escape can present a double-edged sword of peril and destruction. The idealism floating over this forest oasis is a stellar exemplar of the adage, “nothing is what it seems.”

Laura (Taylor Geare) is clothed in a virgin-white dress; her purity is as precious a commodity as their water. (The kids rely on her virginity to keep the water clean and drinkable). Rain — an essential, but finite resource — is the only source of pure water. Life’s fragility is reflected in the home’s rain catch system, which is nestled in the attic: if it breaks, the mistake could cost them their lives.

Though it takes steadfastness in virtues for any system or family unit to work, they’re breached given each of the children’s individual brokenness. With trust the foundation for any successful relationship, their shadiness ensues beneath the trees’ seemingly comforting leaves. Dishonesty, theft and incest throws their once-functioning brood into a tailspin of panic — so much that they might as well be out in mankind.

But the children — even with undeveloped prefrontal cortexes and lacking emotional intelligence — are somehow smarter than the adults. When a parent comes to visit Bee, she is apparently rattled from the isolation. Her delicate blue eyes are as pale as her complexion and expressionless from witnessing too many disheartening events, but enliven with the tears that well up in them.

Her father attempts to coax her into taking “magic pills” or psychoactive meds, to rid her of her confusing thoughts and to be happy again. In this instance, the parent is the evil one, as he refuses to validate her feelings.

With fear gripping the children, these with it youngsters are not only able to slay their personal dragons with an unshakable faith in a future, but have a wonderful way with them.

“What’s the wind doing?” asks Bee to her brother, Nicki (Donnie Masihi), who has every bit the charisma of a young Corey Feldman. “Nothing,” he says.

Lianna Albrizio: One of the main themes in A Wonderful Way with Dragons is virtues, for instance prudence, self-control and patience. In relation to the current times in which everything is so easily accessible, the film illustrates, for one, the intensity of the unexpected joy and peace possible when attaining a precious resource that people may take for granted. In this case, rain. I also inferred about how environments — good or bad — don’t necessarily shape one’s virtues. Clearly, living in a peaceful environment like in the film, did not control the protagonist’s shady desires, for example. Virtues, I feel, are a choice. Was the importance of being virtuous something you wanted viewers to be aware of and question in themselves?

Delfine Paolini: I wrote the script during the pandemic. Virtues were high of mind for all of us. The first thing I thought of was isolation and how this affects everyone’s state of mind and virtues’ impact on behavior. What I came to find was that isolation affects children more significantly than adults in the way their prefrontal cortex is not fully formed, leading to behavioral issues and cognitive decline – all of that affects our virtues. I did write this is conjunction with insolation and how we would re-enter the world after the pandemic if it did in fact end.

In The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, a decline of all certainties that held Western society together would cause society to break up and there was no going back. I wanted to translate that decline of Western civilization and how it paralleled the position we were in. It seemed so significant because it took too much for the return after World War I in that society. It seems the pandemic was so parallel to that time period.

The first signs of civilization in a culture is a broken femur that healed. If you break your leg, you die. You can’t hunt for food. If a broke femur has healed, it’s evidence that someone has taken time to carry the person to safety and has tended to them through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts. If our virtues are not working within a society where you are trying to pick each other up and have a desire to continue to live, there is no way we can come back from that.

Here, we have a little island with a group of kids that have been isolated for what we come to learn is several years. They’re coming of age and they want to know more, take on responsibilities, power struggles start. Kids want to hold onto power and the meaning of life. Society begins to devolve and they no longer have the desire to help each other. In the context of being isolated for that long, they tread the line between reality and imagination and walk that as tightly as possible because what they’re each experiencing could very well be affected by isolation.

Lianna Albrizio: In the film you illustrate how paradise is on the verge of destruction. Though isolation and quietude are considered therapeutic, it seems like peace has its own quiet danger. Just like something beautiful — like the protagonist and the environment. Is that a concept that serves as a cautionary tale to viewers? Especially in this digital age, we’re so drawn to beauty, but it’s not always what it seems.

Delfine Paolini: They fill their own silence with their own misperception. In my mind, writing this, was a dark fairy tale like Peter Pan. My perhaps greats inspiration was my grandmother growing up as a young girl. She’d make me watch Russian and Polish films without subtitles. The image should give you all you need to understand the film.

Lianna Albrizio: The six children are isolated. How would you draw a metaphor between the literal isolation in your film to the isolation people feel today, personally and culturally?

Delfine Paolini: It can translate to pre- and post-pandemic. There’s such immense fear of the unknown and this can happen again. Most scientists say it will happen again. In turn, it caused a lot of people to do much more. in the luxury of their own home. That has, in turn, affected us socially, psychologically and mentally. It happens on the island, they become physically, emotionally and psychologically affected by isolation. We are still affected by that because of the fear of the next pandemic. We’ve all become much more aware of the dangers we were blind to in a way not knowing a pandemic could cross the entire globe. That for me was ignorance is bliss. It was a shock to them we all that this was possible and will now be a mainstay.

Lianna Albrizio: What did making this movie teach you about living life minute by minute instead of day to day?

Delfine Paolini: Working with children is informative. You learn so much from them. They’re sponges. They have to be able to trust you. We’re on this little island by this lake; it was summer camp on the Catskills with no cell service. With the WiFi cut off that helped the experience they had getting into the shoes of their characters. It was my job to facilitate them and help them to feel safe. I didn’t want any of the crew to feel confrontation with each other. If they feel not on study ground that takes away from the magic of the performance.

Violet McGraw came from Megan. When she came onto the set, some people expected her to be the hardest-working actor because she really wanted to go through the artistic process. We were lucky enough to hang out and form bonds because if there’s not something of them injected into characters, it’s not going to have a sense of what is real.

Lianna Albrizio: I want to talk about the dragon concept. The only time in the film that we’re exposed to dragons are through the 90s-era toy camera. Dragons are typically symbolic of good luck and prosperity. Given the challenges and setbacks you and your crew faced with funding this film and the hallelujah moment you had with the smoke emanating from the Canadian wildfires, would you say in a lot of ways this film itself was your personal dragon? The filmmaking seems like life imitating art.

Delfine Paolini: My interpretation was in Chinese culture, they’re symbolic of wonderful chaos and being able to deal with these really significant things. We see them at times at ease moving through the world and not having such an enormous affect.

We almost didn’t finish the film. Our budget was cut before we starting shooting. If a week before beginning shooting the budget is less than what it was, you have to make significant changes in terms of crew, how you might shoot a scene and rework in your mind the way you hope it would translate. I had to rewrite certain scenes. I had a very strong team who wanted to see it through. It was life imitating art because I felt like this is complete chaos. I’m directing and at night having meetings with other investors. I wish that my first experience directing wasn’t in such disarray. Those children put so much into their performance and gave up very big roles to come into these roles. I couldn’t be more proud of them and of what the outcome was.

Lianna Albrizio: What did these unforeseen challenges of getting the film off the ground and the silver linings that ensued teach you about survival and did that impact the film at all?

Delfine Paolini: When we found funding, I was surprised how it got off the ground quickly. We were a little shocked at how this happened. The investor loved the script. Immediately, I was identifying with the characters in the film. Not sleeping, not eating, not being comfortable – the adversity is emblematic of the story in the film – their struggle. We faced that same level of fear in not being able to get to the other side and how we were going to finish this film everyone worked so hard on. It doesn’t feel like I let them down. I had to get the other side.

Lianna Albrizio: Do you know why this role meant so much to McGraw and is there significance behind her red dress?

Delfine Paolini: It was a very different role in comparison to Megan. In this kind of a drama-mystery-fantasy role, it was not about what she says, it what her presence in terms of how she presented and maneuvered without words. She’s just so good at that. She knows how the camera embraces her; she has a face the camera loves. Red represents power in-line with the dark fairytale, Tinker Bell-esque concept.

Seduction is a big theme. In The Waste Land, the dialogue Bee and Wednesday (Theodore Dalton) share is the meaning of that section: is this person going crazy? What is the wind doing? She has risen above what everyone else expects from the past in her mind.

Wednesday is the controller of the wind, rain and storms.

Water is one of the most important themes. Water represents life and they think the virus represents life and death at times. Some are afraid of the water. It’s a paradoxical moment where some of them are scared and some are drawn to it. Water seduces Laura. Gray is seduced by the love of his sister. Kick (Ian Foreman) is seduced by Bee. Nicki is seduced by the underlying life and death.

Lianna Albrizio: Speaking of, I read you study thanatology. What sorts of findings did you apply to the writing of this film, if any?

Delfine Paolini: Understanding and not fearing death has always been fascinating to me. I was always drawn to more morbid stories. In Frankenstein, life is created and destructed. I think that other than Covid, it was probably really important… being drawn to the morbidity of life. It’s something we’re all going to experience. There’s a strong psychological aspect that’s drawn into the picture. I think that fear is a very primary feeling when we start to accept what fate is.

Lianna Albrizio: One of your goals was to visualize what endures and what fades. Without giving away too much, what was one of the most surprising elements that faded and wound up staying?

Delfine Paolini: Faded was truth. What they see and interpret has a tangible effect on the world. What endures is the inner life. Let’s call them the dreams. Hope endures. We have hope because even if one of them got to the island, it might give us hope society is rebuilding. There is hope when they paddle away into this beautiful scene of the mist coming off the lake. I had hoped we would have those conditions – foggy, coming off of rain. Luck played a huge role. All of the fairies were looking out for us.