Emmy and Peabody-winning writer, producer, and director Daniel Minahan’s screen career spans nearly three decades. His first major credit was as co-screenwriter with Mary Harron on I Shot Andy Warhol in 1996. More recently he directed the Netflix miniseries Halston, and has directed episodes of Fellow Travelers, Ratched, Hollywood, American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, The L Word, Six Feet Under, and Game of Thrones, among many other landmark television series.
His latest work as director, the sweeping and emotionally potent feature film On Swift Horses, just received its world premiere at the 49th Toronto International Film Festival. The 1950s set queer drama follows the lives of newlyweds Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Lee (Will Poulter) as they leave Kansas to start a new life together in San Diego, and Lee’s roaming brother Julius (Jacob Elordi) who heads to Vegas to try his luck in the casinos when he returns from the Korean War. Muriel and Julius have an undeniable, almost undefinable connection that endures throughout the years, while each of them have their own intense encounters on their journeys of self-discovery. Muriel, with her intriguingly independent neighbour Sandra (Sasha Calle), and Julius with his dashing and charismatic fellow card sharp Henry (Diego Calva).
Following the premiere at TIFF, Daniel Minahan spoke exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about why he was drawn to adapting Shannon Pufahl’s novel, how he assembled the impressive cast, his approach to the look of the film, and the impact that David Bowie had on him as he was growing up.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: what impact did Shannon Pufahl’s novel have on you?
Daniel Minahan: “I received the novel On Swift Horses from my agent during lockdown. He knows how particular I am and he teased me when he sent it to me with a note saying, ‘I think you’re really going to like this one!’ And I did. As I read Shannon’s novel, it felt like something completely new, but completely familiar at the same time. She was describing experiences that were so unique and that I hadn’t seen dramatized before. It’s a very internal novel, but she is very cinematic in her descriptions.”
“Shannon’s novel also seems to draw a lot on the history of queer literature. There are aspects that were giving me the feeling of Giovanni’s Room, The City and the Pillar, and The Price of Salt. It wasn’t an homage, it wasn’t a quotation, but there was just something about the feelings that were flowing in a really interesting way. Maybe that’s just the truth of the experience, but I was really excited by it.”
“My producing partner Peter Spears—who produced Call Me By Your Name—and I had been looking for something to do, so we were sending books back and forth to each other. I called him after reading On Swift Horses and said, ‘This is incredible.’ He said, ‘I’ve just read that too and I thought the same thing. Let’s go after it!’ He arranged for us to meet Shannon, who is the loveliest person. It was her first novel and we convinced her to allow us to adapt it.”
You mentioned that it is quite an internal book, in working with your screenwriter Bryce Kass, how did you go about translating it to film?
“The challenge of adapting the novel was that Bryce and I needed to give these characeters voices and find ways to contain this very impressionistic, very beautiful, internalized novel that had a lot of memory in it, and to make it move forward and be active. You go after your favorite scenes in a piece of literature when you’re adapting it, but you also go after the things that you think will really dramatize the characters’ desires, so that’s how we went about it. There are all of these incredible set pieces from the novel, like Henry taking Julius to watch the atomic blast in the desert: the most romantic first date ever! And then there were the trips to the racetrack and these journeys through cruising parks and recreating a queer bar and a house party of women. These were really rich things that I haven’t seen dramatized before and I really wanted to to go for it.”
I found those scenes of how our queer ancestors lived really moving. I loved the notice board that we see at the queer hotel in San Diego. What did you want to get across with that sequence?
“The dead letter board is what it’s called in the novel and it’s actually an invention of Shannon’s. Although certainly we’ve all seen posting boards in bars and queer spaces of people trying to find each other or find a party or even a trainer. But this was something different. Because we leaned into the epistolary aspect of the story of Muriel and Julius writing to each other, trying to find each other and encouraging each other and expressing their feelings to each other, it seemed like the board was the perfect culmination of all of that.”
“We go in small and see the detail of posts on the board like, ‘Missing since April 1954’ or ‘Tommy, where are you?’ Notices from queer people trying to find each other. Then when Julius recognizes his own name and takes down the note from Muriel and Henry, we go wide and you see that there are actually hundreds of people looking for each other. I think it’s a beautiful way to show how queer people always find each other, even in the most repressed environments.”
The house party scene and the bar scenes are a great reminder that although we might have been undercover and criminalized as queer people we still found each other.
“I had breakfast with Shannon yesterday to do a post-mortem on the whole weekend of our world premiere in Toronto and I asked her what it was like to watch her novel being adapted like this. One of the things that we came upon was this idea of how creativity and connection can bring people together in the most repressive societies. I think of New York in the 1970s, which was in complete chaos and economic decline, and yet the richest art in its history was created then. I think this is similar. It’s a film about desire and these people are really pursuing their authentic selves, but it’s a very dangerous thing. When your desires are criminalized it causes people to be really inventive. I’m not romanticizing it in any way, but I grew up as an outsider so I really relate to that and it’s an important aspect of this story.”
What were your references and guiding principles when it came to the look of the film?
“The film deals with a lot of familiar tropes. There’s this hard boiled dialogue that sounds like film noir; it has aspects of the melodrama; it has tropes of the Western; and the gambling movie. We tried to subvert all of these tropes and make it more relatable and more mundane almost. One of the things that Luc Montpellier the cinematographer and I decided very early on was that we weren’t going to reference 1950s films. We didn’t want it to look like a pastiche of a 50s film. We wanted it to be accessible and all of the decisions that we made about how we photographed it and blocked things and choreographed them would come down to the singularity of expressing the emotion. That was a big guiding principle.”
“Rather than watching movies, we looked at documentary photography from that period by people like Bruce Davidson, Vivian Maier, and Gordon Parks, as well as paintings from the period. We tried to get a sense of how things really looked. I was always encouraging people towards randomness; the randomness in the frame for the camera operators; and the full range of colour for Erin Magill our production designer.”
“I wanted to avoid a controlled colour palette and to avoid mid-century architecture, except in the casino in Las Vegas which was all new and would would have looked like that. Elsewhere though I wanted to make it more surprising. Our costume designer, Jeriana San Juan, is a trusted collaborator of mine who I did Halston with. In this film, she really managed to give us authentic silhouettes and leaned into the dress codes of that time period, but made them really flattering on our actors. Our actors are already extremely attractive, but she managed to make it accessible.”
Your actors are all terrific in the film, how did you go about assembling the cast?
“We were lucky to get these really accomplished young actors and I feel like they’re cast for their strengths. Daisy’s work on Normal People was a new benchmark of performance in what she was able to create there. That really suited the character of Muriel who is an outsider and watching and imitating. Jacob has this kind of unknowable, mysterious swagger, but he also has a swagger when he turns it on that is absolutely undeniable and charismatic. So that really leaned into Julius.”
“Lee is a really remarkable, unusual character and Will gave him so much dignity and made him so sympathetic without being cuckolded. Diego is one of the most soulful, authentic people I know and we could use every frame of what we shot with him. He’s just a natural and it wasn’t hard to imagine him as the best bad boyfriend you ever had. He had great chemistry with Jacob.”
“Sasha was so perfectly cast as Sandra because she’s self-possessed and strong, but has a vulnerability about her. She really brought something beautiful to that character, especially because you have to believe that she’s a woman who lives on her own. That’s a big attraction for Muriel. The first thing she says to her is, ‘So you live here on your own?’ Then another time she says to her, ‘So you’re not afraid of being alone?’ Sandra is sort of a model for Muriel.”
“The biggest connection we have in the film is between Muriel and Julius and it’s also the most complex because it’s a love that transcends convention and even sexuality. It’s these two queer people who are allies and who are almost like a parallel, mirroring each other and who change the course of each other’s lives. I really owe a lot of that to the skill of these actors who were not only able to trust the story, but also found ways of giving these people interior lives that really suggested they were thinking about each other and that there was a lot going on under the surface.”
When you were on stage at the TIFF premiere you described the film as a queer reimagining of the American Dream, could you expand on that description?
“We have our two characters who are both outsiders for obvious reasons. Muriel’s in a very conventional relationship and building a life with Lee, while Julius lives on the road, literally, and is a card sharp and a hustler and lives by his wits. But they are both aspects of this American ideal of aspiration. Muriel and Lee are aspiring to having children and they get a car, they have a house, and they have modern appliances. They have this conventional community that they’re moving into that will obviously develop over time. Julius is in Las Vegas, which is another kind of American Dream, another kind of aspiration, where you can change the course of your life over the course of a few hands of cards. So that’s how I see it.”
One last question for you, what’s your favourite piece of LGBTQ+ culture, or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you over the years?
“The first thing that comes to mind is Bowie, but he’s sort of in a class of his own. He was a huge influence on me as a young gay kid growing up in the suburbs, promising a different kind of life that existed somewhere else, that was magical and where you could transform and be whatever you wanted to be.”
By James Kleinmann
On Swift Horses received its world premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival and opens in US theaters on April 25th, 2025 from Sony Pictures Classics.