War Pony may not be a sequel to American Honey, but it’s a follow-up in another sense. On Andrea Arnold’s 2015 road movie, Riley Keough was supposed to shoot a scene in a motel on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation with two Native American extras, Bill Reddy and Franklin Sioux Bob. When filming was delayed for six hours, Keough instead chatted and formed a friendship with the duo, even texting her best bud, Gina Gammell, that she should meet them.

A year later, Keough and Gammell visited Reddy and Sioux Bob in Pine Ridge to hang out and, intentionally or not, started conversations that would years later evolve into War Pony, a coming-of-age drama co-written by all four. The resulting feature, co-directed by Gammell and Keough, is a confident, hypnotic immersion into life on the reservation for two young Oglala Lakota men, Matho (Ladainian Crazy Thunder) and Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting), but also a rich portrait of an indigenous community. Whereas American Honey imbued a sense of discovery into its mise-en-scène, War Pony frames the camera with the utmost ease and comfort amongst its surroundings.

“I think we were positioning the camera the way that Frank and Billy wanted us to,” remarks Keough, in May, over a group Zoom call. “Early on, we figured out they didn’t want handheld. If the camera is a person, you want it to be someone who’s familiar with Pine Ridge in the way Bill and Frank are. Handheld can make films seem, as Frank always says, ‘grittier’.”

“The whole reservation is a character,” notes Sioux Bob. “When you use handheld, it looks cheap, and you can’t capture the whole rez in its essence.”

“There was great intentionality with each of the setups,” chips in Gammell, another voice on our four-way call. “There’s less control with handheld.”

Adopting an almost documentary style, War Pony drifts in and out of numerous stories to establish a relaxed rhythm, albeit one filled with mini-dramas in each scene. 12-year-old Matho steals from his father’s secret drug stash to make extra cash around the neighbourhood; once caught, the kid is kicked out and forced to crash with friends. Meanwhile, Bill, aged 23, already a father to two children via different mothers (neither speak to him), hatches onto his own moneymaking plan involving poodle breeding and, eventually, driving young, vulnerable woman on behalf of a shady businessman.

As an actor, Keough has proven she’s as comfortable in crowdpleasers like Mad Max: Fury Road and Magic Mike as she is in provocative fare like Under the Silver Lake and The House That Jack Built. Still, despite Keough’s versatility, War Pony isn’t what many would have predicted for her debut feature. Moreover, Gammell’s previous experience is largely in music videos. The duo met via mutual acquaintances after a screening of American Psycho, which led to Keough moving in with Gammell within a few weeks; several years later, they’ve formed a production company together, Felix Culpa. Do they perceive War Pony as an example of their filmmaking vision as a duo, or an exercise in amplifying other voices?

“Very much the latter!” says Gammell. “Riley and I very much considered ourselves as vessels for Franklin and Bill’s stories. The mission was: how do we completely remove ourselves from this film? Is there a way to consciously, carefully, and respectfully be truly collaborative in a way that goes against the history of auteur cinema?”

“Frank didn’t want Pine Ridge to feel like, quote-unquote, ‘poverty porn’,” says Keough. “It was about listening to what they didn’t want, and then coming up with the language together.”

What steps were taken, then?

“The thing that separates it most from poverty porn is the voices, stories, and monologues,” says Sioux Bob. “If you go to Pine Ridge today, that’s how they’re going to sound. Not every single person, but there are kids and adults still moving like this. That’s the reality. It’s not just that there are bums in the corner drinking and that’s all you want to show. There is that, yes, but there’s so much more. The film shows you the highs, the lows, the family – everything. It comes from a Native voice, which separates it from every other film I’ve seen about Natives.”

During the four-year writing process, improv sessions and workshops were held in Pine Ridge to flesh out a script and establish an all-Native acting ensemble, nearly all of whom are first-time actors. According to Gammell, at no point were she and Keough “making things up” or “pushing things one way or another”, they were simply attempting to capture the essence of the locations and characters.

The dual storylines also juxtapose the homelives of North Ridge and East Ridge. “They’re very different parts of town, even though they’re right next to each other,” Keough explains. “The Bill character and his friends were based on the real Bill. The Matho character we based off stories Frank, Bill, and everybody told us about when they were younger.”

“I’m not interested in watching myself act. I’m not always the best person for the job. I think there are way better actors out there than me” – Riley Keough

As all three are on the same Zoom call from separate locations, I feel emboldened to ask: what was their biggest creative disagreement during production?

“Maybe Frank’s holding onto some resentment?” says Gammell, I think joking.

“I feel like I got everything I needed to get out!” says Sioux Bob with a laugh.

“We’ve been in arguments,” Keough says, not being specific. “We’ve all yelled at each other. But it’s all love at the end of the day.”

Gammell and Keough are writing another feature they hope to direct together. It will, presumably, be remarkedly unlike War Pony, which makes it apt that Steven Soderbergh, an auteur whose style is to not repeat himself, is thanked in the end credits.

“In the edit, Steven spent a day with us,” says Gammell. “He forced us to look at the rhythm and unlocked something for us.”

“We were struggling,” says Keough. “As he’s a genius, he was like, ‘This is the solution.’ We were like, ‘Why didn’t we think of that? Because we’re not Steven Soderbergh.’”

Keough doesn’t sound particularly keen to act in any of her films with Gammell. Is the appeal as a writer-director to helm projects where there isn’t necessarily a role for her? “If I’m wanting to direct actors, part of it is watching actors act,” Keogh clarifies. “I’m not interested in watching myself act. I’m not always the best person for the job. I think there are way better actors out there than me.”

War Pony opens in UK & Irish cinemas on 9th June. For more information head to http://warpony.film

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