She’s the granddaughter of Elvis and the star of one of the most talked-about series of the year, Daisy Jones & The Six.
But when it came to directing, actress Riley Keough says that she and her co-director, British-Australian Gina Gammell, “struggled” to get War Pony, their first film, funded.
“There’s a lot of talk and I think there’s some great effort, but I don’t know if the people who are making those decisions are totally there yet,” she says.
“I don’t know if some have caught up on the concepts that women can be in positions of power and can be trusted.”
War Pony is the story of two young Native American men trying to find their place in the world that doesn’t offer them much opportunity, and was filmed on Pine Ridge Reservation, the lands of the Oglala Lakota, in South Dakota, using a largely local cast and first-time actors.
It won the Camera D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year – the prize given by the festival to a best debut feature film. But at points, Keough wondered if the film would be completed.
“You have two females making their first feature with a completely indigenous cast of, quote unquote, no value in terms of the marketplace and no movie stars,” Keough explains.
The film tells the story of two young Native American men trying to find their place in the modern world
War Pony was filmed on Pine Ridge Reservation, the lands of the Oglala Lakota, in South Dakota
“We see this a lot because Gina and I have a production company and we see the money that’s given to men versus women, first-time filmmaker or not. And it’s really an issue still. At the end of the day, we had wonderful financiers who understood the vision and came together and supported us, but prior to that it was really depressing, you know.”
Gammell adds: “We’d be finishing a week of shooting and we were making phone calls trying to get the next week of shooting paid for.
“And we were really lucky that we got through it, and we only just managed to get through it. It was incredibly tough.”
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