[music]

Brigid Bergin:  This is All Of It. I'm Brigid Bergin, filling in for Alison Stewart. Tomorrow is the release date for War Pony, an award-winning film at last year's Cannes Film Festival. The film was co-directed by my next guest, Gina Gammell, alongside Riley Keough, who was also an actor who most recently appeared in the series Daisy Jones & the Six. Gammell and Keough co-wrote the script with my other next guest, Franklin Sioux Bob, and his friend Bill Reddy, both of whom pulled from personal experience to tell a story about two young men on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation.

Matho is a 12-year-old boy who is rapidly entering adulthood. In school, he has a sweet crush on his classmate and passes notes to her. Outside, Matho is beginning to experiment with drugs and get in fights. The other main character is a young man in his early 20s named Bill. Bill is navigating fatherhood, trying to support two kids and their respective mothers in order to make ends meet. He picks up odd jobs for a wealthy white turkey farmer.

Here's a clip from early in the film featuring the two of them. Bill's just given the farmer, named Tim, a ride back to his house after his car broke down. Tim speaks first.

Tim: How would you like to make another $100?

Bill: Yes. How so?

Tim: Thing is I'm supposed to have dinner with my wife, and I was hoping that you'd do me a favor, head out to the truck and swap out that tire for me.

Bill: Mmm. Is it all yours?

Tim: Yes, it's all mine.

Bill: Mm. I could do it for $200.

Tim: Okay. Here's the thing, Bill. The important thing here is that I got a girl out in that truck.

Bill: Oooh.

Tim: I'm going to need you to give her a ride home. Could you do that for me?

Bill: Yes. Where she stay?

Tim: I don't know. You have to ask her. Somewhere on the Ridge, I think.

Bill: That's a couple of hours to go pick her up and an hour back to Ridge. Plus I don't even know where she'd be staying. I'm going to need a little bit more than $200.

Tim: How much more?

Bill: $400.

Tim: $400?

Bill: And a job.

Tim: And a job. What makes you think I got a job for you?

Bill: Man, you got two big houses, big old land. Man, you must be doing something right.

Tim: Uh-huh.

Brigid Bergin: War Pony arrives in theaters tomorrow. Co-director and writer Gina Gammell and co-writer Franklin Sioux Bob join me now. Welcome to All Of It.

Gina Gammell: Hello.

Franklin Sioux Bob: How are you doing?

Brigid Bergin: Franklin, you and Gina co-wrote the script with Riley Keough and a fourth collaborator named Bill Reddy, and you and Gina originally met through Riley. Can you talk about how this collaboration worked between four writers?

Franklin Sioux Bob: Well, it started off as a friendship because me and Bill Reddy, my co-writer and my friend, we were street casted for the American Honey film. From there, we met Riley because we were in the scene with her, so we just bonded up. We just formed the friendship from there, and a few weeks later Gina showed up.

Brigid Bergin: [chuckles] Gina, how long after you met did you start talking about making a film together? When did this specific story really start to take shape?

Gina Gammell: I think that this started a few years in. I think that so much of the foundation of our friendship was being creative, whether it's sharing stories or messing around with cameras. Playing like kids almost. So much of the beginning of our friendship was doing that. Frank makes music too, and so we helped him shoot a music video. There's always a lot of this collaborative spirit and a lot of playing, but I think that talking about a real movie and this movie was a few years into our friendship.

Brigid Bergin: I want to talk about the two boys who are the central characters of the film. It follows, as I mentioned, Bill, who's about 23 years old, and Matho, who's 12. Their stories remain mostly separate for most of the film. Gina, when we meet these characters, where are we meeting them in their lives?

Gina Gammell: Similarly, I think that they're both in transitional coming-of-age moments. Matho is in the puberty stages of turning into a young man and Bill is a young man growing into adulthood. That's where we meet them, and I think that they're entirely bonded by living within the same neighborhood and living within the same community and town.

Brigid Bergin: Franklin, can you talk a little bit about where the idea of each character came from? Did you come up with one storyline before the other?

Franklin Sioux Bob: Well, with the storylines, how they meet towards the end, both of those characters, Bill could have lived that whole lifestyle coming up, so he could have experienced all that. It just depends on the person because a lot of households are separate but they all go through some of the same trauma. Being from Pine Ridge and growing up in that cycle, you can recognize it early on, and you could try and steer someone clear or you can show them the bad way too. It's just those stories, you could grow up living both of those stories essentially.

Brigid Bergin: Sure. As you were conceiving these stories for the movie, did you start thinking about Matho's story or Bill's story first?

Franklin Sioux Bob: It was mainly just pooling the experiences and trying to put all the stories together in a way they flowed because we've all just experienced a lot of wild lifestyles growing up. At the end of the day, if you had no flow it would just sound like a bunch of stories. Some of them being outlandish, they wouldn't make sense unless you actually experienced them and know what we're talking about. Trying to create that on paper to make sure everyone understood that flow was mainly just-- I don't know.

That was my main thing, was trying to make sure people understood that this can actually happen. It might be just on a random day that all of this happened and it's so traumatic but we still get through it. It's not something that just stops us. It's like, "Oh well, that was yesterday. Yesterday was a really ugly day, but now it's today. I just hope it wasn't like yesterday." You know what I mean?

Brigid Bergin: Sure.

Gina Gammell: To extend on that, I think that there was like-- Like Frank just said, there are so many stories, and I think that we knew pretty early on that there was too many stories to fit into one character. Also, a lot of these stories are very personal stories of Frank's and Bill's, or their friends and family, and I think that we-- It was very clear to all of us that their youth and their childhood had influenced their manhood, and I think that that's where the-- probably Frank, right? Where the idea to separate into two characters and create a younger boy and an older one.

Franklin Sioux Bob: Yes. Because really, like you said, you could tell that he was growing up fast and that's the reality. You can see Bill's character might be the end result of growing up too fast, but then now you're seeing Matho in real-time and it's like I can see why you would feel some type of way when you're 23 years old because of the way you had to grow up and had to adjust.

Brigid Bergin: I want to talk a little bit about Matho. The character is only 12. He's at this point in his life where he's really discovering who he is, and he has two parental figures in his life. His father, who is involved with drugs, can be violent, and a woman-- Was it his grandmother?

Gina Gammell: The auntie.

Brigid Bergin: Auntie who has these rules, no lies, no violence, go to school. In both of these relationships, I think it's so interesting the way you show them he is both a boy, but he's also being forced to grow up so quickly. I want to play a short clip, and this is Matho speaking with his father. I think that, for me, it was a moment where I really felt that here you have this-- This is a kid but it's a kid who's dealing with a lot of stuff.

Matho's Father: You ate already?

Matho: Yes.

Matho's Father: What did you eat?

Matho: Oh, my bad. That was last night, but I'm not even hungry.

Matho's Father: All right. What's that?

Matho: Look for the Magic.

Matho's Father: Show me your magic.

Matho: What kind of magic?

Matho's Father: I don't know. Show me your card trick, is all.

Matho: Only my card trick?

Matho's Father: Why not?

Matho: Because it's not real magic.

Matho's Father: What's real magic?

Matho: When you can change things with your mind.

Matho's Father: I'll show you a magic trick. I'll make this food disappear.

Matho: [chuckles]

Matho's Father: All right, man. I'm out.

Matho: All right. I'll be in in a bit.

Matho's Father: All right.

Brigid Bergin: Franklin, Gina, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what you were trying to do in that scene. For me, that contrast of this boy giving the food that he has in his bag to his father, but then also pulling out a magic book. You get this sense that this is a kid, this isn't a grownup.

Gina Gammell: I want to start by just saying that Franklin actually plays the father, so he is actor and writer. That's a little nugget that not that many people know.

Brigid Bergin: It's an amazing performance

Gina Gammell: It is. You said it. I think that it's easy to forget that this is just a child. I think that it was really important to us to instill some kind of childhood imagination and magical thinking, and also this hopefulness into Matho as a character. Also, this mutual nurturing that exists within families. Frank?

Franklin Sioux Bob: I think it was just to try and still show the innocence that he is a child at the end of the day. He's a child. He wants to learn magic. That's an innocent thought. I feel that it was more of a "What reaction can I get from my father pulling out this magic book?" and seeing that innocent reaction you look for as a kid.

Brigid Bergin: What's so interesting is you also cast a lot of first-time actors in this film. Both Bill and Matho were first-time actors. Gina, how did you find them?

Gina Gammell: I think as soon as we started writing the movie, we all knew that we wanted to cast locally. It was just years of searching. We had amazing casting directors who came in, Eleonore Hendricks and Abby Harri, who assisted in the search, but it was all of us. Just meeting people, talking to people, meeting people, talking to people, and then running a very loose and experiential auditioning process.

Yes, it was all first-time performers in the film, but it was also mine and Frank's and Billy and Riley's first time writing a movie. All of our first time making a feature. I think that it was a lot of firsts, and that really was a huge part of the experience for all of us.

Brigid Bergin: Let's talk a little bit about Bill's storyline. A lot of his plot line centers on a dog named Beast. He buys the dog in hopes that it will have puppies that he can sell to make some fast cash. What do you think the dog represents to Bill, Franklin?

Franklin Sioux Bob: I feel like it just represents stable and for sure. Because dogs are a family essentially, so it's a stable unknown. I have that sense of comfort if I have this dog, and regardless of everything going around, I have that for me. You know what I mean?

Brigid Bergin: Yes.

Franklin Sioux Bob: At least I have this. I might have a lot of things going on around my life and a lot of issues here and there. I know that this dog is essentially a hustle, but at the end of the day, I still have something that is there for me. That's just something I can see as well.

Brigid Bergin: In real life, your co-writer Bill Reddy also owned a dog named Beast. The real dog was a pit bull.

Franklin Sioux Bob: Yes.

Brigid Bergin: Why did you make the dog in the film a poodle?

Gina Gammell: That is a good question. I think that that really is indicative of the writing process based on the truth but sometimes reinvented to help the narrative, or adjusted to help the narrative. I think that we were thinking of something that could be a little bit more unique and a little bit more lucrative for Bill. I think that the poodle was something that Bill Reddy, the real man Bill, had quite a funny reaction to when we pitched it, and that's how it stuck.

Brigid Bergin: It makes for such a charming scene to see this poodle and to have him snuggling with this poodle and of course, what we see from puppies. These are definitely not the only animal who plays an important role in this film. There's a deer that has a really significant role. There's a bison that appears in a ghostly way at different points throughout the film, and of course, the film is called War Pony. How do you think about the place of animals in this story?

Gina Gammell: Frank, why don't you take that one?

Franklin Sioux Bob: Well, even with the buffalo, traditionally the buffalo holds a lot of value to us as Lakota people because we've followed the buffalo our whole-- Like our ancestors, we followed the buffalo wherever they migrated. We followed that buffalo and used every part of that buffalo until the US government came and wiped out all the buffalo and did all that and further assimilate us onto Pine Ridge, but that was our lifeline. We followed that buffalo, so it was just only right to make sure that was in there.

Then to piggyback off of the War Pony, the war pony is-- that's a car. That's like a red slang for a car. You know how you hear of a hooptie-

Brigid Bergin: Sure.

Franklin Sioux Bob: -or a bucket? That's a war pony on the Ridge.

Brigid Bergin: That's so interesting. Let's talk a little bit also about the role of fathers. Matho and Bill's stories remain mostly separate throughout the film, but one idea that connects them is fatherhood. Matho's father is absent for part of the film, as you know, and Bill is figuring out how to be a father to his young kids. Gina, what interested you in exploring fatherhood from these two different angles?

Gina Gammell: What interested me in exploring was Bill and Frank because it's their stories and they're young men. Billy at the time was the father of two. Franklin is now a father of two. I think that it was really led by them and their experiences in boyhood and into manhood.

Brigid Bergin: From your perspective, Franklin, what do you think is the lesson from Matho's story for Bill or back or vice versa?

Franklin Sioux Bob: I feel like Bill seeing a part of him and Matho without having the father figure is why he ended up how he is. He's just trying to not only better himself, but in that moment, he wants to-- Okay. Well, I do have two kids, and eventually my son is going to be this age, so it's just putting himself in those positions mentally like, "Okay. Now I need to step up. Now I need to actually make the actions rather than just talk about it."

The whole father dynamic, most of us grew up fast because we had to because we didn't have fathers to lean on, or I personally didn't. My father was there but he wasn't. Even in the film, the way I die in the film, is like there's a lot of parallels to my own life. Not having a father and growing up fast, it just puts it into perspective because we all grew up in a matriarchal society. There's a lot of grandmas and aunties, and it just shows if you don't have it this is what can happen. You can steer a wrong path. That's more often than not just because they didn't have an example before them.

I think in that moment it was like he saw the cycle coming up again and he was trying to, "Okay, I need to break this, even if it's in small steps."

Brigid Bergin: Yes. Well, that's where we're going to have to leave it for today. My guests have been co-director and writer Gina Gammell and co-writer Franklin Sioux Bob. Their film War Pony arrives in theaters tomorrow. Thank you so much for joining us.

Gina Gammell: Thank you.

Franklin Sioux Bob: Thank you.

 

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