RILEY KEOUGH WAS waiting to shoot a scene in American Honey — Andrea Arnold’s 2016 sprawling coming-of-age drama — when she struck up a conversation with supporting actors Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy. The friendship that followed between the actor and the two young Native-American men was the foundation for War Pony, Keough’s directorial debut (she co-directs with frequent collaborator Gina Gammell).
The pair had to fight to get the film off the ground. “Two first-time female filmmakers, an all-indigenous cast and no famous people was not a combination that people were throwing money at,” Keough tells Empire. Yet they weren’t deterred from making the film, based on the stories of the people of Pine Ridge reservation, where American Honey was partially filmed, and where Sioux Bob and Reddy, who have co-written the film, live. “We actually started the production without all the money raised,” Gammell recalls.