You know it’s tourist season in New York when a sasquatch roams through Central Park on the weekend and earthquakes barely interrupt a work day.
Nathan Zellner, the co-director of Sundance 2024 film “Sasquatch Sunset” (who also appears in the feature), donned his sasquatch costume to promote the feature ahead of its April 12 release date. Zellner transformed into a 6-foot-7-inch tall creature to stalk tourists and locals alike in Central Park near the American Museum of Natural History, as reported by The New York Times.
The suit weighs approximately 40 pounds, and Zellner paired it with platform shoes to increase his height. The costume is the same one used in the production that co-stars Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough. Zellner’s brother and co-director, David Zellner, wrote the entirely wordless feature that follows a family of sasquatch in the wilderness.
Zellner told the New York Times that walking around Central Park in costume was a “good social experiment” and just for fun rather than a formal marketing campaign for “Sasquatch Sunset.” David Zellner and a camera crew were also on the premises following Zellner in costume.
The cast of “Sasquatch Sunset” attended a “boot camp” to learn how to have a “lumbering” gait like a sasquatch would, as actor Christophe Zajac-Denek said during the IndieWire Studio at Sundance, presented by Dropbox. The cast wore full-body prosthetics and fur to have a “real depiction of these creatures in their environment,” Zajac-Denek explained.
Co-star Eisenberg called the film a “very unusual” yet “brilliant” project that brings the Zellner Brothers‘ fascination with Bigfoot to the big screen. The duo previously released the Sundance award-winning short film “Sasquatch Birth Journal 2” in 2010.
Eisenberg told IndieWire at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival that the “Sasquatch Sunset” screenplay was “one of the top five greatest scripts I’ve read in my life.”
“It’s so brilliant, a very unusual, most likely impossible to pull off the premise, and then fill it with the funniest, sweetest, touching, kind of almost human story,” Eisenberg said. “It transcends the fact that these characters are not humans and yet it still feels relatable.”
Read the IndieWire review from Sundance here.
