Jake Paltrow thought of late dad with dystopian drought drama ‘Young Ones’

TORONTO – Jake Paltrow looked to his late filmmaker father when he started writing the dystopian water-shortage drama “Young Ones,” now in select theatres and on video-on-demand platforms.

The writer-director says the project began as a “love story” between a father and son and then expanded into a futuristic drama about a family dealing with political and social conflict on a dusty landscape plagued by global warming and drought.

Michael Shannon stars as the father, Ernest Holm, who is trying to defend his farm and children (Kodi Smit-McPhee, Elle Fanning) from water bandits. Nicholas Hoult plays the calculating boyfriend of Elle’s character in the sci-fi western that’s told in three chapters.

“There’s a lot of him in it,” he said of his dad, director Bruce Paltrow, who died in 2002 at age 58. “He died young and we were very close. Not that it’s autobiographical in any way at all, but I think there’s a lot of him in that character (Ernest) — his sort of compassionate, though-guy thing, and that was a big part of the Ernest character.

“We were very, very close, and so it just was something I started working on and liking the feel of and followed through.”

Paltrow also felt the influence of his mother, actress Blythe Danner, as he crafted the story and went on to direct it.

“From an environmental perspective, that’s just something I grew up with,” said the New York resident, who is the younger brother of actress Gwyneth Paltrow. “My mother is still a very active environmentalist.”

Paltrow said he was heavily influenced by the early books of S.E. Hinton as he wrote the story, which follows his 2006 feature debut “The Good Night” starring his sister as well as Penelope Cruz and Danny DeVito. He didn’t intend on making a heavily political “message picture in an sort of old-school Hollywood kind of way, but it naturally has these qualities.”

The environmental angle came when he started reading stories about drought outside of North America, specifically in Yemen and Chile. He felt adding that element would bring a fresh perspective to the post-apocalyptic sub-genre.

“In the time it took to make the film, these problems came to the United States,” said Paltrow, who has also directed some “NYPD Blue” episodes.

“California is where I’m originally from and had just been, and it had reached quite catastrophic levels there.”

Paltrow initially planned to shoot the film in Spain in 2012 and had a crew of 30 or 40 people there before production was halted just before cameras started rolling. He said the stoppage was largely due to the economic downturn in the region.

He ended up shooting it with a low budget in early 2013 in a remote part of South Africa that has faced — fittingly — a water shortage.

“The farm that we shot on an, all of that landscape, that is in fact the land,” he said. “The family whose farm that we shot on had really lived through not quite as dramatic a water crisis but certainly a very meaningful one. Only by the good fortune of their father, who had been a higher up at one of the local mines and was able to get them to run a pipeline to his home, that they could actually even live on this farm.

“Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to live there. Their well hadn’t been full in four years.”

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