Riley Keough

This writer cannot stop fawning and I completely agree with everything they said. Keough is so fun to watch in anything she’s in. More on reddit.com

• As an interviewee Riley Keough is described as friendly, but defensive, even a bit prickly; she has the wariness of someone who has grown up in the spotlight (her mother is the late Lisa Marie Presley and her grandfather is Elvis). The interviewer also received strict instructions from Keough’s publicist to avoid personal questions about her family. • In 2015, Keough was in a motel in South Dakota shooting Andrea Arnold’s American Honey. As the hours dragged, she got chatting to a couple of extras, Bill Reddy and Franklin Sioux Bob, two Native American men who’d grown up on the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation. “It was one of those situations where we started talking, and we just didn’t stop. Then lunchtime came, and I found myself going, ‘Can I sit with you?’” • The friendship led to Keough and her friend/producing partner Gina Gammell teaming up with Reddy and Sioux Bob for the upcoming indie film War Pony, which Keough and Gammell directed and produced, working from a script by Reddy and Sioux Bob about growing up on the reservation. • The stars of War Pony, Jojo Bapteise Whiting and LaDainian Crazy Thunder, are first-time actors cast from the reservation. Keough prickles at calling them "non-professionals," the official term. • War Pony won the Caméra d’Or award for best debut feature at the Cannes film festival last year. • She is the first to admit that her privilege opened doors: “Amazing opportunities! I walked into agencies, met with agents.” But it left her racked with doubt: “I felt that I wouldn’t be taken seriously.” • One of the producers of War Pony, Native American film-maker Willi White, says his previous experiences of film-makers from outside the community was very negative, with them swooping in and extracting stories from the reservation and abandoning them. “They generally tell the same story,” said White. “Because what they see is only at the surface level; it’s poverty, it’s hardships and challenges.” White believes these films directly increased prejudice against the community locally and reinforced harmful stereotypes. By contrast, War Pony was a collaborative effort. It’s written by Reddy and Sioux Bob with Gammell. All the Native American parts in the film – which was most of the cast – are played by Indigenous actors. Non-Indigenous crew were given mandatory “cultural competency” lessons before the shooting of the film. • At the financing stage, the harmful stereotypes White warned against became evident. Potential backers felt the script wasn’t bleak enough and the film had too many light moments, and didn’t highlight the poverty angle enough. “They wanted it to be more sad, more devastating,” says Keough. “That really disturbed me.” • More than once it was suggested that they insert a white character and white perspective into the film, much to Keough and Gammell's annoyance. “A white person they could identify with in the film, an entry point for a white audience,” says Keough. For about five minutes they considered writing in a white journalist. “Then we took her right out,” says Gammell. In the end, the biggest non-Indigenous character is a rich turkey farmer who deludedly believes he’s a decent enough guy – written to show the insidiousness of casual racism. • “By the time it came to making the movie,” says Gammell, “we were aggressively aware that we were two white film-makers making this movie. But we felt that if the other alternative was the film wasn’t going to get made.” • Keough and Gammell are insistent to share credit with Reddy and Sioux Bob. In all the publicity material, the writers’ names appear before the directors. “We were very much vessels for Bill and Franklin,” says Gammell. “The collaboration remained intact the whole way through shooting.” Keough agrees: “What we wanted to achieve was to help facilitate showing Pine Ridge the way they see it, Billy and Frank; really take any of our thoughts or opinion out.” • Keough is basically used as a Trojan horse to talk about the film and Indigenous filmmaking. More on reddit.com

God he does the weirdest movies More on reddit.com

I hope Lily is continuously booked and busy,I’ll be tuning in for this.

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