Crossing the globe in search of fortune. It’s an idea that greatly appeals to US writer-director David Zellner.
He admits he and his co-writing brother Nathan have always had a sense of adventure, ever since they first began making their own movies as kids at their familial home in Greeley, Colorado.
“We’ve always loved the idea of going somewhere beyond our backyard,” Zellner says down the phone line from Sydney where he’s been promoting the brothers’ latest work Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter.
It’s their most ambitious project so far, one that took them far from their filmmaking base in Austin to the suburbs of Tokyo and the wilds of Minnesota. And it all started from an online message board and near 20 year old movie made by another pair of siblings.
“I came across a story referencing a woman who went from Tokyo to Minnesota in search of the mythical fortune from Fargo (the Coen Brothers’ 1996 black comedy recently itself reborn as a TV series). Initially that was all the information that was out there.”
Like nature, Zellner admits he abhors a vacuum so he set about creating a backstory for her. “It sounded so fantastical and also so antiquated. It reminded me of a story from the age of exploration – like a conquistador looking for a city of gold.”
While he honed his story, different versions of the truth began to emerge online.
“It became more like something you would see on the local news. There wasn’t an actual quest. But, since the urban legend was far more interesting to me – that’s what I ran with.”
The result is Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter the tale of a
