Texan filmmaker Sheridan takes helm of swirling ‘Wind River’
Taylor Sheridan flunked out of Texas State University without a backup plan.
The Cranfills Gap native says just getting into college was “my crowning achievement at that point.” He left the San Marcos school in his early 20s with no diploma and no marketable skills.
“I could ride a horse,” he says. “But riding a horse doesn’t count. It doesn’t pay. I guess I was liberated by my lack of options.”
So he moved to New York to become an actor, in part because he’d watched the TV miniseries “Lonesome Dove” as a college freshman. “For whatever reason, I guess it’s because it’s a very Texas-centric miniseries, but I thought that was what I wanted to do,” he says. “I’d always been fascinated with storytelling. But for a kid from North Texas in the ’80s, the notion of moving across the country and chasing a dream like that seemed foolish and absurd.”
It might have been, but it also worked out.
More than 20 years later, Sheridan, 47, has found footing on both sides of the camera. He spent about 15 years as an actor, earning small oneoff roles on TV shows that grew into longer arcs on others such as “Veronica Mars” and eventually “Sons of Anarchy,” where he played the idealistic police deputy chief David Hale for most of three seasons.
But storytelling kept calling to Sheridan. At 40, with a family, he realized acting gave him neither security nor creative control. He started writing a script about a young FBI agent thrown into a nasty conflict with a Mexican drug cartel, which became “Sicario,” a 2015 film starring Emily Blunt that won over the critics and made double the cost of production at the worldwide box office.
Sheridan’s second screenplay, “Hell or High Water,” concerned a pair of small-town bank robbers on a spree in Texas and the aging lawman trying to stop them. It earned Sheridan an Academy Award nomination for screenwriting. The 2016 film also earned a nod for best picture.
This Friday his third screenplay opens. With “Wind River,” he decided to take full control and direct the film, too — though there are easier ways to become a first-time director than shooting in the dead of winter in the mountains of Utah.
“I don’t think I fully grasped the extent of the challenge,” Sheridan says, laughing. “And yet there’s something to be said for doing something that arduous. You quickly catch up with the speed of it. Obviously, making something that didn’t involve constantly changing weather, without the elevation, would’ve been easier. But I don’t know if any of this is easy.”
Despite any complications, Sheridan the filmmaker works well with material by Sheridan the writer. As a screenwriter, Sheridan has a natural gift for using distinctive settings as a character, a hallmark of the old westerns he clearly loves but also over these three screenplays aspires to deconstruct and modernize.
“Sicario” was set along the border, and “Hell or High Water” through a string of small Texas towns nowhere near an interstate. “Wind River” begins with a teenage girl running barefoot and without proper winter gear through the unforgiving snow that falls on a Native American reservation in Wyoming. Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a local Fish and Wildlife employee who hunts predators slaughtering local livestock, finds the body.
“Wind River” is driven by its investigation into the death, which pulls in a local reservation law enforcement officer (Graham Greene) who is already spread thin and a young FBI agent (Elizabeth Olson).
In his trio of screenplays, Sheridan has presented a shadow America. He takes relatable themes — financial and familial struggles, addiction, cycles of violence — and places them in settings viewers may find unfamiliar.
“All three films were in areas I spent time in, so I had seen them and experienced them,” he says. “And you hear people talk about these different places, and they’ve never been there. So there’s one perception of a place and its people, and then there’s reality.
“There’s an interesting thing happening in our society where everybody is a critic and can cast judgment with the push of a button on their phone and reach millions of people. That’s a tremendous amount of power. I don’t think the average person recognizes the responsibility that comes with it. I’m so scared of that responsibility that I don’t do social media. Without ever having been to a place or met a person, they’re judging. One of the great things about film is we can explore some of these places and present them. To allow people to go on a journey there and meet them in some fashion.”
When Sheridan started writing more and taking acting gigs less, he also relocated with his family to Wyoming. There he noticed an insulated world such as the one he presents in the film.
“You’re dealing with a place with 80 percent unemployment,” he says. “And a life expectancy in 2017 of about 48 years old. Where violent crime is five times the national average. These things are ignored.”
In these outsider environments, Sheridan works themes to which viewers can connect. One that ties together all three films he’s written is that of parenthood, the anxiety of which tempers the joy.
Amid the crime and investigation of “Wind River” is a story about parents coping with loss — Renner’s Cory as well as his best friend, Martin (Gil Birmingham). Martin is a native of the Wind River reservation. Cory married into it. Yet they have much in common. That, more than solving a whodunnit, is the driving force behind Sheridan’s film.
“There’s a certain deconstruction of stereotypes of cowboys and Indians that I wanted to explore,” Sheridan says. “To deconstruct that myth. At the root of this story, they’re both fathers, and they’re friends bonded by a shared grief and seeking a way to move on from it. They both have sons they have to raise, so the struggles with them continue.
“And I think that’s an idea that’s transcendent beyond the characters. That can apply to a family in a big city, a family in the country, a family in Clear Lake … anywhere.”