Ben Rivers: how fan mail from Don DeLillo helped shape Mare’s Nest

Nine-year-old girls reciting the gnomic prose of Don DeLillo became the starting point for Ben Rivers’s new film and the culmination of an unlikely friendship with the writer. Rivers, a lifelong DeLillo fan, was stunned to receive a hand-typed letter in 2017 after a mutual friend sent DeLillo a DVD of Rivers’s 2015 film The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers; DeLillo praised the film and later wrote again after seeing Rivers’s 2019 Krabi, 2562.

In 2020 Rivers asked to adapt DeLillo’s 2007 play The Word for Snow. DeLillo said he could not really see it as a film but gave Rivers his blessing to use the play, which Rivers placed as a key scene within Mare’s Nest. The film follows a girl called Moon wandering a strange, adult-free landscape: children appear to be inventing new rituals and repurposing the detritus of civilisation rather than descending into chaos.

Mare’s Nest was shot in Menorca, Snowdonia and a London studio.

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