Over the last decade, Emmy-nominated writer, director, and producer Sydney Freeland has forged an impressive film and television career centering marginalized characters and diverse voices. Earlier this year, Echo, the Marvel limited series that she directed and executive produced, premiered at number one on both Disney+ and Hulu. Back in 2014, her debut feature, Drunktown’s Finest, inspired by her experience growing up on the Navajo reservation, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival where her sophomore feature Deidra and Laney Rob A Train also premiered in 2017 before launching on Netflix.
Freeland wrote and directed on the first season of FX’s Independent Spirit and Peabody Award-winning comedy series Reservation Dogs, and has directed episodes of television shows such as Heathers, Tales of the City, Station 19, Nancy Drew, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Grey’s Anatomy, The Wilds, Fear The Walking Dead, Rutherford Falls, and P-Valley.
Her latest feature, Rez Ball, which she directed, executive produced, and co-wrote with Sterlin Harjo world premiered earlier this month at the 49th Toronto International Film Festival. Produced by basketball legend LeBron James, the touching and inspiring coming-of-age sports drama follows a basketball team in Chuska, New Mexico which must band together to keep their hopes for a state championship alive after losing their star player.
As a basketball fan herself who played in high school, Freeland was drawn to adapting this real life story inspired by Michael Powell’s 2019 book, Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Reservation, and his earlier article in The New York Times. Casting the young men on the Chuska Warriors team, who could both act and play basketball, led to five thousand submissions, among which was the film’s star Kauchani Bratt who makes his assured and captivating screen debut as Jimmy. Established actress Jessica Matten takes on the role of the Warriors’ determined new coach, Heather, who returns home to the Navajo reservation to take up the challenge of turning around the team’s fortunes.
With Rez Ball launching globally on Netflix on Friday, September 27th, Sydney Freeland speaks exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about how she got her start in the industry, her approach in bringing Rez Ball to the screen, and the LGBTQ+ culture that has had the biggest impact on her.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: What initially drew you to telling stories on screen as a writer and director?
“I wasn’t looking to go into film because the concept of filmmaking for me didn’t exist. I grew up on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico and I went to movies like everyone else. I saw all the names up on the screen in the credits, but that meant nothing to me. I felt like I was so far removed from all that, so it wasn’t something that could be a possibility to even comprehend. But I was surrounded by artists working in traditional mediums, like painting, weaving, pottery, and silversmithing.”
“When I left the reservation for college, I went to study painting and drawing. When I was there, I was exposed to all these mind-blowing new mediums like computer art, computer animation, photography, and creative writing. Creative writing was this crazy new thing to me where I was like, ‘I can just tell a story and write it and it can have a beginning, middle, and an end? What is this?!’
“All of that came to a head during my final semester as undergraduate when I took a film class. I was probably 23 and that was the first time I had ever touched or picked up a camera. Not to sound cliché, but I remember that first day of that first film class when I was like, ‘I don’t know what this is yet, but I know that it’s what I want to do.’ I didn’t know anyone in the industry or have any connections. I didn’t even know that people could get paid to work on a film set. But from that point, I threw myself into film school and then packed my bags and moved to LA where I did the whole production PA intern thing and and worked my way up into different areas. So that was the jumping off point.”
When did you start making your own short films and writing your first feature?
“My first job in LA was as a PA on a cooking show. About an hour and a half into the first day, a producer said, ‘Who has a MacBook Pro?’ I had just got one because I had a grant, so I was like, ‘I have a MacBook Pro!’ And he went, ‘Great, you’re our media manager’. I was like, ‘What the hell is a media manager?’ I didn’t know, but I had to figure it out. So I spent the course of that season on the show learning media management.”
“What was great about that job was that it was the hub between the camera department and editing department. So I got to interact with both of those crews and actually got jobs in the camera department as an operator and as an assistant editor and as an editor as well. I was able to swing back and forth between those areas and to get production work in those departments.”
“In between production jobs, I started writing and directing. Whether that was directing a spec commercial or a short film or writing my first feature film, Drunktown’s Finest, which I then submitted to the Sundance Labs. Fortunately, I was able to get into those Sundance Labs and that’s where I was able to really get a start and to get some momentum going.”
It sounds like you had a great insight into so many different roles on set, which I imagine for you as a director now must be really useful as you’re orchestrating everything.
“Oh, yeah, I think it’s massively helpful. Especially to have an appreciation of all those shit jobs like the PA intern. I remember I had to do one job where I had to stand watch on a generator for 18 hours to make sure no one stole it. I was off on the side just sitting there with noise blaring in my ears for 18 hours, but I was so excited to be on a film set and to be part of it. I was like, ‘We’re making cinema, baby!'”
“A film set has these concentric circles of crew working on it. When I’m directing, my perspective is very myopic and I’m hyper focused on my DP, my AD, and the actors. So that’s where my focus is, but knowing how all those jobs work on the outskirts of a production has really been helpful, especially on something like Rez Ball where we had a very quick production schedule. When I got my first feature we had 15 days to shoot, so having that understanding of how a film set works meant I knew what I could and could not ask for.”
How many days did you have on Rez Ball?
“It was 29 days total, but we had 11 basketball games to cover. So we had to set aside 10 days to shoot all of our basketball stuff and then that left us 19 days for our narrative.”
The basketball sequences really drew me in, they are dynamically shot, exciting to watch and we feel the stakes. How did you go about working with your DP, editor, and the actors to keep us so invested in those games?
“It was certainly a balance because we had a very finite amount of time to shoot our basketball games, so we had to be extremely prepared going in. Thankfully, we had an amazing basketball choreographer in Mike Fisher who functioned in a very similar way to a stunt coordinator. He would break down the choreography of the games and the plays with the actors days before, so when we got to the set everyone knew the basic mechanics of what they were doing and we could run through the scenes.”
“What it really boiled down to was capturing the emotion in their faces in a close-up, then getting a tracking shot, and then an over the shoulder shot. You get those three things and you’ve got the basic fundamentals of a basketball play, but one of the things that we kept coming back to was asking, ‘What is the emotion in the game?’ We didn’t want to do a cool shot for the sake of doing it, we wanted to have an emotional thrust behind it. So that was the essence of my conversations with my DP, Kira Kelly, and also in working with my editor, Jessica Baclesse. It was about trying to let the emotion drive things. If we had a cool shot, but it wasn’t contributing to that, then it was gone.”
There are so many breathtaking shots of Shiprock running throughout the film, what did you want to capture on screen about the Navajo reservation?
“You’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s the Navajo reservation, it’s Rez Ball. It’s not city ball or suburban ball or anything like that. So it was really important from an authenticity standpoint that we were able to shoot on the reservation. There’s a texture and a spirit to the land when you’re there and being in that environment allowed everyone to really inhabit their roles with that backdrop.”
In terms of this being an Indigenous story told by Indigenous people, you’ve described it as telling it “from the inside out”, what did that mean to you as a filmmaker?
“Going back to when I was first breaking down the project with my co-writer Sterlin Harjo, we were talking about those movies where the white savior comes in. Whether it’s Dangerous Minds, where it’s the white teacher coming into the inner city, or Freedom Riders, or something like Hoosiers, where the big city coach is going to come out to the country and teach these country rubes how to play basketball the right way. One of the things that we were very adamant about was that we didn’t want to have an outsider coming in to lead these kids. It had to be somebody from the community.”
“We both come from matriarchal communities and also women’s teams have traditionally had more success than the men’s teams when it comes to basketball on the reservation. So that’s where the idea came from to have Heather Hobbs, who is from the community, come in as a coach for the team. That’s what we knew and what we were familiar with. That decision had all of these positive consequences. What I mean by that is, if you have a coach who’s from the community and she’s leading these boys in the community, when they face adversity she has to find solutions from within, things that she knows from her own experiences.”
“As we started pulling on those story threads, that’s how we got something like sheep camp. She’s not going to take them to the big city and show them how to eat at a fine dining restaurant and which forks and spoons to use to become gentlemen! No, she’s going to take them to sheep camp to build a team working exercise. The more you keep pulling at that story thread, then that’s going to plant the seed with Jimmy to ask a question like, ‘What if we call the basketball plays in Navajo?’ So that’s where that’s coming from.”
The sheep camp sequence is great, with Sarah H. Natani as Velma. I also loved her as the grandmother in Billy Luther’s Frybread Face and Me that was at TIFF last year.
“Sarah was so great! She was this breath of fresh air on set. Sarah’s from the rez and that day when we were shooting it was windy and there were rainstorms coming in and out. We had our producers running for cover and getting umbrellas and everybody was protecting themselves from the wind and the rain, but Sarah was just out there being grandma. She was being a champ and sitting out there rain or shine, windy or whatever, because this is her backyard. While everyone else was ducking for cover, Sarah was a trooper and she crushed it. She’s become an audience favorite.”
Heather, the team’s coach, is a queer character, but that aspect of her life is handled very casually in the film. What was your approach to her queerness?
“We did have more of a fleshed out narrative and we introduced a potential love interest, but as we got into the edit things organically fell to the wayside. The intent was to have this unapologetically queer character. We don’t have to justify ourselves, we don’t have to have this whole coming out narrative or anything like that. She knows who she is, but she’s still going through her own respective struggles. It was about trying to approach the character in a matter of fact way and make it more about the conflict of her finding that next place in her career and being enveloped in her work while trying to balance a relationship. I wish we had more time to mine more of that, but that’s where that idea of the character is coming from.”
When it comes to grief and ancestral trauma, what were some of the things that you wanted to express or explore through your characters in Rez Ball?
“Grief is certainly a central theme in the movie and more specifically how we process grief, because we all process things differently. One of the best pieces of advice I got when my father passed away a few years ago was from my cousin who is a pastor. He said, ‘There’s no right or wrong way to grieve. Just give yourself permission to let those ideas go. The important thing is to allow yourself to have those emotions and go to those places.’ That’s always stuck with me because our family was really affected by that and we all went through our own different journeys and are still going through those journeys. The same goes for our other relatives.”
“Rez Ball is very much a story about grief. Not necessarily overcoming it—because it never truly goes away—but giving ourselves permission to grieve, giving our ourselves permission to move on, giving ourselves permission to move forward, but still honoring and caring for and loving those relatives that we have lost. That was a central theme for us.”
Kauchani Bratt is a real discovery, what does he bring to the film as Jimmy?
“Kauchani is a natural talent. He’s got this innate ability to lock into the emotion of a scene and the emotion of a situation. He’s got this phenomenal ability to dial in. He had never been on a film set before. This is his first movie. One of the big things for all the kids is that they had to be able to play basketball, but they had to be able to act as well. As we were going through our five thousand submissions, there were definitely some players and actors that stood out amongst the crowd and Kauchani stood out very early on. Obviously he was raw because he had never done this before, but you could see there was something there. There’s an inherent charisma and an inherent ability to be natural on camera.”
“Coming into this having worked with first time actors and young actors before, I was aware of my limitations. I knew that I was only going to have so much time for rehearsal and to work with these actors. What I didn’t want to happen was to step onto the set for the first time and have a day or two of rehearsals with an actor where we were meeting each other and feeling each other out on the day in front of a huge crew. So we were very fortunate that we were able to bring on an acting coach, Noëlle Gentile. The conversation with her was about giving these kids a fundamental language for how to approach a scene as an actor. She was so great at giving them that basic language and that really helped. That was an amazing relationship. She was really there to help set them up for success.”
There’s a great soundtrack too, with some Lil Nas X on there.
“Yeah, Kier Lehman our music supervisor was so great. He did the Spider-Verse movies. On the reservation, I grew up with rap and country music and as we got into production on Rez Ball I was wondering whether it was still that same dynamic. The answer was absolutely yes. The kids would play this song, “Chicken Fried” by Zac Brown Band in between takes, but then they’d also play rap and hip hop. So I said to Kier, ‘My music library is 1990s to early 2000s, so what’s the contemporary version of this dynamic?’ He had so many great options and I’m really happy with our soundtrack.”
One last question for you, what’s your favorite piece of LGBTQ+ culture, or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you?
“When I was first transitioning and feeling all these complex emotions, there was a book called Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides that was a comfort for me as I was going through my own personal transition. There weren’t exact parallels in it, but I remember that being a big support for me personally as I was coming out.”
“On the film and television side, it’d have to be 2014, which was a big year for the transgender experience becoming a part of mainstream American society. I think you can really look at before 2014 and after 2014. The big thing for me was seeing Laverne Cox on Orange Is the New Black, seeing a trans actress playing a trans role. Yes, there had been roles like that before, but nothing on that level and scale. Then that giving way to something like Pose, which was a story about trans women of color with trans women of color both in front of and behind the camera. Those things have all been particularly influential for me.”
By James Kleinmann
Rez Ball received its world premiere at the 49th Toronto International Film Festival and launches globally on Netflix on Friday, September 27th, 2024.
