Searching For The Fargo Money

"There’s less mystery in the world now,” laments David Zellner. “There’s no uncharted lands, everything is mapped out with satellite imagery. If you’re seeking information, you have the immediate gratification of finding it online. The facts are so close at hand, it’s harder for myths to grow.”

The Austin, Texas-based filmmaker is speaking, broadly, about his most recent feature, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (the follow-up to the weird, great Kid-Thing). The film, which Zellner co-wrote with his brother, Nathan, was inspired by a 2001 stranger-than-fiction tale where a Japanese woman travelled from Tokyo to Minnesota to look for the buried suitcase of money from the Coen Brothers’ legendary comedy Fargo.

“We heard about it on message-boards, this was well before Twitter or Facebook,” says Zellner. “It was an urban legend, this mythical quest; something so strange and mysterious to us, that something like this could happen in the modern age... The fact that the story was incomplete and kind of mysterious, that there was this absolute lack of information, only fuelled our obsession with it.”

The Zellner brothers immediately wrote a screenplay, but that marked the start of their own epic journey: from first draft to final cut taking 12 years. “We’d go off and work on other projects,” says Zellner, “but we’d always come circling back, because we were obsessed with this project in the same way that Kumiko was obsessed with her quest.”

“We didn’t set out to make a homage to the Coen Brothers."

Even once the Zellners entered production, the filming of Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter was a “huge logistical ordeal”. The shooting had to be seasonally specific, and on location in Japan and in the snowy US Midwest. Aside from the brothers and their cinematographer, Sean Porter, there were entirely different crews on each continent. “It was essentially like making two completely separate movies, back-to-back,” says Zellner.

The drama is hitched to a central performance by the ever-great Rinko Kikuchi, which, Zellner enthuses, “artfully balances the humour and the pathos of the role, whilst still having such empathy for the character”. The character’s motivations or sanity are never defined, which sits at the centre of a drama out to play with “different versions of the truth”.

And for those who love Fargo, this film’s deadpan comedy and snowy scenery will feel familiar. “We didn’t set out to make a homage to the Coen Brothers; if the urban legend had been about some other film, we would have made it about that. But that said, the fact that it was about Fargo always just seemed like a perfect part of the story, like it was intrinsic to why people were so obsessed with this quest.”