Stories That Are Thematically Linked: A Conversation with ‘Americana’ Writer-Director Tony Tost

A heist of the mythical Lakota Ghost Shirt goes horribly wrong. Unlikely heroes and villains must navigate a new playing field in pursuit of this legendary Native American artifact renown for bringing its owner power, fortune, or freedom. An elevated, darkly comedic crime thriller told through intersecting storylines that precipitate a showdown of epic proportions.

Simply put, this quiet Neo-Western needs the full 70mm big screen experience to truly catch and relish all of the nuances that writer-director Tony Tost intended. From intentional framing to the sound design, this film will be one cinephile's new and old will quickly add to their Criterion collection (when available...one can wish).  

It's not hard to believe that a film of this levity, character work, and craft is Tony's feature directorial debut. On first impression, you'd be sure this was from a seasoned filmmaker. But this is thanks to Tony's meticulous prep from imagery to communicating with his team and also his previous writing credits such as Longmire to his own show Damnation, and not to mention, Tony loves films...really.

Tony Tost recently spoke with Script about how one specific image was the nucleus for this script, the importance of preparation, how his creative writing and poetry background influences his screenwriting, utilizing a MacGuffin, and so much more!

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: I want to this conversation off by chatting about that 360 shot of Cal and the trailer in the middle of nowhere. You’re immediately in this world, the Western genre and I feel like it’s a clever story device you’ve neatly wrapped in there inviting your audience into this story. Each shot frame is so intentional – I’d love to hear about your creative collaboration with your cinematographer Nigel Bluck and how you came up with that composition down to choosing lenses.

Tony Tost: The nucleus, the kind of seed of the whole film was actually that opening Cal chapter. I didn't know what to do with it. I had this image of this white kid, watching old westerns, not identifying with the Cowboys, but identifying with the quote-unquote Indians in it. Because of his home situation, because of the time, and then him kind of living in a Western in his head - Cal's not strictly a stand-in for me, but there's a lot of elements of my childhood in Cal - I was a weird loner kid, I grew up in a series of trailers near the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation in Washington State, and my adoptive father was a former police officer who was now the janitor at my elementary school and hated it - and me and him didn't really get along. And my mom was a teenage mother and like anyone, everybody's got their own personal baggage. And so, it's an exaggerated version of that.

The seed of this has to do with the Western in it, it has to do with this kind of blue-collar overlooked world that I grew up in, and actually, before writing the script, I just wrote down a series of shots, a series of images before dialogue, it's just very visual based. So yeah, that 360 shot was always kind of in there. The sense of this kind of Western landscape and that you're on your own out here, and that there's an isolation and that it's a different vibe. That's even written into the script, but that was there from the get-go.

Alex Saks, my producer, and I spent a good year putting together the talent package before we went out to try to set up the movie, just because we knew I'm a first-time filmmaker, I'm not a big name, it's a little bit of a left-field genre and story, it's got a lot of strikes against it. There's hints of non-linearity, there's some chapters and the things that people respond to, and the people, knock on wood, who are enjoying it is because this is different than what usually comes out. It's not following the Hollywood kind of blueprint, but the fact that it doesn't follow the Hollywood blueprint made it harder to get going. That's that kind of catch-22.

But we knew, ‘OK, well, one way that we get this made is to get an interesting cast,’ but that took a while. And so in that, I was trying to rewire my brain from just screenwriting brain to director brain and so I basically made an absurd 450-page directing handbook for myself where I went scene by scene, like just a shot list, and then also tons of reference photos from different movies or from photographers I like. I kind of built that up in the interim before we even got financing, because part of it is like, ‘OK, if I'm gonna fall on my face as a first-time director, it's not going to be because I didn't prepare myself. I'm going to put in the work.’

I had that as a starting point. And when we actually got the green light, and prep started, and Nigel came on, we went through that document with the department heads, three to four hours a day for a week. And that just gave us a chance to talk aesthetic sensibilities, thematics, and how I saw the scenes. And we talked about the logistics of it, and some problems and people pitch other ideas. And that really gets us all on the same page, just the sheer time it takes to do that.

But then separately, Nigel knows shot listing and shot making better than I do, he's a great experienced DP, and I'm a first-time director. We went back through the script and did a proper shot list, scene by scene, again, using my original shot list, which was always designed as kind of the jumping-off point. We had 26 days to shoot it - and Nigel likes to shoot with two cameras - because that's the only way we could actually do this - it's a pretty ambitious movie on that schedule. He’s got this great brain for how to design interesting shots from A and B cameras at the same time.

In terms of lenses, I dabble in it, but I don't have the inside working knowledge of the lenses that Nigel has, but I do know what I want it to look like. So I gave him a list of films, mostly films from the 70s like, The Sugarland Express, Joseph Sargent’s White Lightning with Burt Reynolds, Paris, Texas, a couple of Paul Thomas Anderson movies, but mostly movies from the 70s and just kind of talking like, ‘Let's aim for that like that vibe.’

And so from that, he got some vintage anamorphic lenses from the early 70s and we shot on those and then with our colorist Alex Bickel it was again, those same reference points, how can we make it feel like not like a tribute to 1970 but a version of that and to have that kind of lived-in feel. I wanted the movie to feel like it always existed. And so that from the score to the lens choice to how it was edited is this idea of trying to capture that 70s vibe. So there's this whole holistic thing of where you don't want people to necessarily notice it, but you just want the picture to feel like its own living organism and it all kind of just works together in a weird way.

Sadie: Yeah, it's it does work in a beautiful, weird way. And I think cinephiles are going to really enjoy this film. In my humble opinion, you guys knocked it out of the park.

Tony: Oh, cool. Thank you.

Sadie: In terms of the writing aspect, what was the genesis behind breaking this up into five chapters and utilizing the Ghost Shirt as the MacGuffin?

Tony: It was originally that opening chapter with Cal and the Westerns. I had that originally, I didn't know what to do with it. And then I finally wrote it. And I'm like, ‘Well, is this a short or is this something bigger?’ And then I thought, ‘OK, maybe I'll write something like Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales, or Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, where it's a total anthology film. They're all discrete little stories that are thematically linked, but the narratives are separate. And so I went in writing that and I was gonna do my take on 70s genres or 70s types of films that we don’t see anymore - like my take on a revisionist Western or my take on a rural crime film like Charley Varrick or something like that.

And then about halfway through, I started having the realizations like, ‘Well, it'd be so much more interesting if these were connected and all in the same world.’ And so, the chapters thing, the structure was almost in there before the story. And then I found that the different elements of the plot, it allows me to enter into them through what I think is the most interesting point of view at the time, and to kind of set things up and let them kind of hang in there, go to another angle, and then pick up that that story thread now later without necessarily having to go through all the shoe leather to get there. And it was also a way to avoid the kind of three-act structure that development executives and screenwriters and everybody's kind of welded to in a way - I think a lot of people also get tired of it.

It took some revising to land on the different characterizations. Originally, Lefty and Penny Joe, instead of being this kind of innocent couple, they were originally going to be much more hard edge, like, the woman was going to be just out of prison, and the guy was going to be a street racer. And it actually was my wife who was reading it, she was just like, ‘I know you like these archetypes, Tony…but I don't give a shit about these people. I just want some characters to root for.’ And so, it took a couple of iterations and then I came to that version of Lefty and Penny Joe. And that's when it emotionally opened up and stopped being kind of a genre exercise, and it started feeling a bit more character-driven once I had those characters.

I had some ideas but I was just kind of writing and things would be surprising. Like Mandy's backstory, all I knew going into writing it was that there's going to be this artifact and it was going from hand to hand in a way, and that Mandy was going to drive off with it, but I didn't know where she was gonna go to, until I was writing it. And I was like, ‘Well, shit, it would be cool if she went to some kind of compound,’ where it makes sense, where there's armed people, because this is my take on a Western. And so, I wanted to have that old west kind of showdown that's to me as part of the social contract of that genre. And so that was a nice surprise.

But in terms of that structure, I almost in a way lucked in or backed into the structure, because of my original intention the anthology story. And even the non-linearity, it was just almost a byproduct of having come up with that first section as opposed to some kind of master plan of setting something and then and rewinding back again.

In terms of the Ghost Shirt, obviously, it's a MacGuffin, because it's what everybody's after. But it's also not a MacGuffin, because it's real. And it has a real history, and there's a real trauma attached to it. I had known about the Ghost Shirt and the ghost dance society. For years, I used to be an academic, and I wrote a book about Johnny Cash - Johnny Cash has an album called Bitter Tears, it's basically stories of American Indians - and in writing the book about Johnny Cash, I researched some different elements of American Indian history, and that was one that was just very compelling to me, because I'm always interested when different cultural pools influence each other and fuse together in unexpected ways. 

And the Ghost Shirt – the idea of the Lakota believing that Jesus was going to come back, that was a very interesting fusion of cultures that could only kind of take place here. And so anyway, I always had that in my mind. And so it was the idea of having something everybody's after, but in a way, I also wanted to reflect on the history of the West as a historical place, but also Westerns, and there's a way I don't want to - because it's going into spoiler territory - but my understanding of the Ghost Dance religions, part of the impulse was that this would be a way to rid the land of white men. And the idea that - this is a Western with the Ghost Shirt at the center and things don't tend to go well for white men in this movie. I don't try to have any characters comment on it – it’s an interesting way of fusing the artifact with the genre.

And in terms of getting glimpses of it - you see a little glimpse of it in the trunk. I played around a lot with when to see it, and when to comment on it. And I used to have a little quote, a prologue about the Ghost Shirt at the beginning, then I took it out, because it felt a little didactic, and it felt a little bit hedging my bets and then I'd written some ADR for Roy Lee Dean at the end talking about the Ghost Shirt - that was a constant push/pull in terms of that of trying to land at a point where it feels present but we're not talking about it all the time. At some point, I do have a character who basically gives his version of the history of it just so that we have some context for it with Pendleton, Duvall played by Toby Huss…that's all trial and error and you're never quite sure that you get the right balance.

Sadie: Knowing that your background is creative writing and poetry, how much did those backgrounds influence how you approached world-building and character voices in your screenwriting?

Tony: I think it's helped – weirdly. I have friends who've made - some successfully - and some still trying to make the leap from fiction to screenwriting. And the difficulty, as far as I can tell for them, is really good fiction writing is so much about interiority and the inner voice and inner lives, and for me, screenwriting is just is strictly writing images, and almost in a way that dialogue should always be subservient to the images. The perfectly written script for me is you turn off the sound and you can follow every beat of the story. And so, in a way, I believe poetry, the kind of poetry I wrote, which was weird, surrealist kind of imagistic is just linking images together, and juxtaposing them to create emotions. And that could almost be a definition for screenwriting I think.

It's like finding images, trying to conjure up something that in and of itself is interesting, but in the juxtaposition or in this the sequence of them grow in interest or in meaning or emotion, just through weird, almost subliminal connections or juxtapositions. So that it kind of grows and it becomes some other thing through their interaction. So that to me, that's script writing, that's editing. And that connects to my poetics past in a lot of ways.

For me, the best poetry says as much as it can in as few words as possible. And again, that's also dialogue. The only thing as good as writing a great line is realizing I can cut a line, or I can cut a scene. The more I can take away, the happier I get. And again, I think that's the poetry thing. You write a five-page poem, and then you may end with a 10-line poem, but you had to kind of write the five pages, the connections between them, and then you take out the connecting material, in the best version the connection between those lines is felt there, but it's all energy, and it's all vibration. And that practice and that willingness to just be as ruthless as possible with the eraser in both the script and an edit is something I think I've kind of honed. And also, nobody gives a shit about poetry. [laughs] And so doing the work itself has to be the reward.

And then you also just have to trust your own inner voice as to what's good or not, because other people will, if it's good or bad, people just kind of pat you on the back and they're like, ‘Oh, that's cute, you're a poet.’ So, you have to kind of build up some resiliency, build up a work ethic in terms of putting in the time every day, but also just trusting your gut in a way and that's kind of carried over into screenwriting, and directing, in a good way to have almost formed as a creative person somewhere else. And then to step into this, higher stakes, higher pressure - if I had stepped into this role in my 20s, I don't think I could handle it. As much as I wish I could have been like Paul Thomas Anderson and emerged in my 20s, there’s a lot of reasons why my first film is in my 40s, but I had to become a whole creative person elsewhere in lower pressure environments before I could step into this one.

Sadie: What kind of stories or themes are you interested in exploring as a storyteller?

Tony: I've been doing the TV work thing, mostly, and then writing for hire on feature scripts that haven't been made yet for like…this is about 11-12 years now. And there's some definite patterns. I'm interested in America as an idea, as a reality, and the kind of tension between the two that comes up a lot. 

Class is a big thing. I grew up blue-collar, in trailer parks, my parents were day and night custodians at my elementary school and were the president and secretary of their labor union. And now I work and live in LA, as a creative professional. That's not the world I grew up in and there's this kind of dual citizenship. I don't feel fully at home here, among white-collar professionals because I'm into pro wrestling, and I'm not very refined and I don't feel comfortable. But I go back home, and I'm not really there anymore, either, even though I'm loved, and I love everybody there, culturally I've gone through academia - there's this kind of foot in both worlds thing that I'm always trying to fuse. So that's there.

And also, I love genre. And so basically, I'm just trying to tackle what I think of is like, popular genres or maybe muscular slash macho genres, but to kind of do them a little bit more soulfully or intelligently than is expected. Take materials that could be just a B movie, but in execution or in the themes, elevate it so that you can even watch it just as a popcorn thing. That can be Neo-Western, like Americana, or could potentially be a horror or blue-collar sports story, or a hitman movie.

The ideal career for me would be - my reference points again are all the 70s - I love Robert Altman, Hal Ashby…Michael Ritchie did Bad News Bears, which is my favorite movie of all time, Peter Bogdanovich. Not big epic filmmakers. Small human-scale films that were still kind of in Hollywood genre traditions but have a filmmaker's personal spin on it - probably a little bit more Howard Hawks than John Ford, you know, in terms of that kind of vibe, like trying to be humanistic about it and not be too big of fireworks and stuff like that, but these little personal filmmaking touches or character touches that are maybe unique. 

I couldn't be a Kubrick or a Fincher perfectionist, I'm a little bit more of a shaggy vibes storyteller rather than making monuments. I like watching both. I love Lawrence of Arabia, but that's not an influence because I'm just not trying to do that. I love it. The influence is stuff like The Long Goodbye or The Sugarland Express or something like Hell or High Water, or Sicario, or things like that, where regular people can enjoy it, but also if you're a cinephile, there's something maybe there for you, too. And that's the sweet spot I'm aiming at.

Americana premiered at SXSW on March 17, 2023.