Life on ‘rez’ Sheridan’s inspiration
If being a good listener is a hallmark of true friendship, then Taylor Sheridan must be one hell of a friend. The successful actor-turnedscreen writer credits the gripping, often harrowing, stories he’s heard from his close friends in two very different worlds — recession gutted West Texas, and Wyoming’s American Indian reservations — with inspiring his last two original screenplays.
Sheridan’s 2016 heist film, “Hell or High Water,” for which he received an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay, was based on “witnessing and hearing a lot of stories from friends who suffered” from the subprime mortgage crisis, said Sheridan. “I knew guys who were draining the stock tanks on their ranch and selling the water to frackers. It was painful, and those stories stay with you,” Sheridan said by phone from Park City, Utah, where he was prepping to shoot his first television series, the frontier drama “Yellowstone,” starring Kevin Costner.
In the new brooding thriller, “Wind River,” which he also directed, Sheridan returns to the familiar themes he’s explored in all of his original work to date: the ways stoic men struggle through failure and loss, and the ruthlessness of the history of the West, where “the landscape is an antagonist itself,” he said.
“Wind River” is based on the stories Sheridan’s friends on Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation have been telling him for years “about assault, abuse, substance abuse, exploitation, unsolved murders. I just kept hearing them,” said Sheridan, 47.
“There are worlds that exist right beside the world we all know that are still suffering from the manner in which the region was settled, and to me that was something that really warranted exploration,” he said. “From Jackson Hole to the ‘rez’ is only a two-hour drive, one of the poorest counties in the nation about 100 miles from one of the richest.”
The Wind River Reservation, established in 1876, has a crime rate five to seven times the national average. Residents — members of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes — have a life expectancy of 49, and unemployment hovers around 80 percent, according to government records.
“Wind River” stars Jeremy Renner as wildlife tracker Cory Lambert, who teams up with a rookie FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) to investigate the murder of a young woman whose body he finds in the snowy woods. Lambert himself is grieving the loss of his teenage daughter and the breakup of his marriage after her death.
“He is a broken man, suffering with no outlet,” said Sheridan. Renner’s character grew out of Sheridan’s lifelong fascination with Clint Eastwood Westerns, in particular the “iconic ‘Man With No Name’ (Eastwood’s character in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns). What happens when that guy doesn’t win and can’t save the girl? How does he face it?”
“Taylor explained Cory’s inner turmoil to me by saying, ‘I wrote this picture because I wanted to see what would happen with a piece of steel banging against a piece of granite.’ Something’s gotta give,” Renner said by phone from his Hollywood home. “It was a wonderful analogy for me to cling to.”
The 46-year-old Modesto native’s performance in “Wind River” has already been lauded in early reviews. “Jeremy’s able to wear emotions like clothes, and in his body before he’s said a thing, he is literally the personification of grief,” said Sheridan. “I don’t know how he does it.”
“This (script) was troubling to me at first,” Renner said, especially since he’s now a father with a 4-yearold daughter. A young woman’s rape, a father’s grief: “These are very difficult tragedies to deal with in this. I wouldn’t have done the picture if it didn’t leave you with some kind of hope and catharsis by the end.
“The first question I ask every director, which I asked Kathryn Bigelow (before ‘Hurt Locker’) and everybody else, is, ‘How do you want your audience to feel when they walk out
of that theater?’ Their answer really tells me what their motive is, where their head is really at.
“That hopeful quality at the end (of ‘Wind River’) was very important to Taylor — and it was to me too. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”
“Wind River” is the third in what Sheridan considers a thematic “trilogy of the modern American frontier.” While writing “Sicario,” his breakout hit about drug-cartel border violence, he “got the idea that it could be part of something larger, exploring the consequences of settling the West and how much the region has changed in the last 100 years — and how much it hasn’t.”
Sheridan started hanging out on reservations in his late 20s, while living in Los Angeles as a working actor. The square-jawed Texan had recurring roles on “Sons of Anarchy” and “CSI.”
He decided to get behind the camera for the first time for “Wind River” out of a deep respect for telling his Indian friends’ stories the right way. “I credit them with changing the way I think about my place in the world, about culture and race,” Sheridan said. “When the film was done, I wanted to be able to look my friends in the eye.”