IN Magazine talked with the director, screenwriter, and two actors of On Swift Horses, the film that has taken TIFF by storm…
The Toronto International Film Festival has no shortage of queer offerings this year, chief among them the new film, On Swift Horses. Directed by Daniel Minahan (Fellow Travelers) and starring Jacob Elordi, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Diego Calva, and Will Poulter, the film is adapted from the novel of the same name by Shannon Pufahl. The movie tells the story of Muriel (Edgar-Jones) and her husband Lee (Poulter), as well as the latter’s brother Julius (Elordi), who comes to visit his family in post-war 1950s Kansas.
The three main characters separate as Julius moves to Las Vegas to become a card shark while Lee and Muriel descend to San Diego, California, looking for a fresh start together near the beach. But Muriel and Julius have secrets they aren’t willing to share with Lee, including their shared love of gambling and interests in queer relationships that test their understanding of what is legal and appropriate during a time when such actions could get them arrested or worse. Calva enters the fray as Julius’s love interest, a fellow gambler with a penchant for cheating at cards.
IN Magazine had the opportunity to discuss the film’s themes and relationship to modern queer audiences with the director Daniel Minahan, screenwriter Bryce Kass, and actors Diego Calva and Will Poulter.
It’s been more than twenty years since your last film, though you’ve worked steadily in television directing hit series like Fellow Travelers as of late. What does it feel like to finally have On Swift Horses debut to a large audience?
Minahan: When I set out to make another feature, I knew I wanted to make a love story. I’ve spent many years working on a series and working with the best writers on all kinds of varied stories. But the thing that really spoke to me was this novel, and it touched me in a very personal way. It felt familiar, it felt surprising and by that, I mean, like in the way that it described queer experience. I thought it was really unique, because it’s sort of a reimagining of the American dream, but through a queer lens, and how these people navigated their lives, hid themselves and found each other.
Similar to your recent work in Fellow Travelers, the main characters are hiding their identities for what they believed was the greater good at the time. Does this film express that theme very similarly?
Minahan: I think the difference here is that the antagonist in this film is this sort of unspoken world outside. One of the things that really appeals to me about this story is that there’s another very unconventional antagonist, which is Muriel’s husband, Lee (Poulter). Rather than being abusive or somehow a typical antagonist, he’s actually the most loving character in the story. Everyone has a secret, and his is that he knows everyone’s secret and he doesn’t care. He wants so badly for the three of them to be a family. I was really lucky to get Will Poulter for that role. He’s so perfectly cast and gave that character so much dignity.
Will, how do you respond to Dan’s praise of your work in this movie?
Poulter: That’s really interesting. I mean, I’m so lucky to work with Dan, and I feel like he was really an amazing leader for us. Particularly in respect of telling he queer story and certainly educating me in respect of what the queer characters in this story go through in terms of trying to live authentically as themselves. The barriers that they came up against, just the sort of sensitivity and authenticity that he brought to that I was super grateful for.
What can you say about queer life in the 1950s that hasn’t already been said in other films like On Swift Horses?
Minahan: It’s interesting because gay and lesbian films from this time period are usually about the lonely life of homosexuals. It usually ends tragically, either with them alone or murdered or taking their own lives. The thing that appealed to me about this novel is that these are people who are really living their lives. I knew when I was a kid, my parents had known a lesbian couple, but no one ever said they were lesbian. They lived together. They lived in the next housing development over in Maryland, one wore trousers and Shetland sweaters. The other one wore skirts and they were my parents’ favorite friends. I think no one describes the mundane aspect of it all that people did find each other. People were able to make lives, and people had great exciting lives. I just felt like this was an alternative side to the typical American.
When it came to adapting the novel into a feature film, how did this project come to you?
Kass: Daniel Minahan brought me the book, and right away I found it intimidating. It just made me cry, and the characters were so rich and alive, and they had such well described inner lives. That was really the challenge because it is a very internal book, and the majority of my work was just to figure out a way to externalize these really rich inner lives and bring all that to the table in a cinematic way, in a dramatic way. I had a great collaborator here with Dan on hand to help him to get there. Then when the actors finally arrived on set, I came with their characters fully formed. They took those rich internal lives from the book, and just made them sing and live.
Do you think the elements presented in On Swift Horses can resonate with modern queer audiences?
Kass: I think, unfortunately, it’s very relevant for the moment in time we’re in where American freedoms are being rolled back, and there’s only more on the docket, more coming on the line. Things go in a certain direction. This is a movie about a time and a place where characters were not free to speak their mind. Today, I can hold my partner’s hand in the street and go to a bar with him. Back then, there would be a police raid at any hour nightly. I think that the characters that are in this book and in this movie, they batter down that door for us. Alot of times, we take the freedoms that the characters in this movie sort of created for us just by living their authentic lives, we take those freedoms for granted.
Diego, you play a casino worker in this film and a little bit of a card shark when it comes to gambling. In researching this film, I’ve read that gambling is kind of a code for queerness. Can you explain that to me a little bit and what it means to your character’s relationship with Jacob Elordi’s?
Calva: I think that we’re talking about this time when different people used to hide, not only queer [people]. Just imagine being a Mexican in the middle of Colorado in the 1950s. So there was this time when all different people, all the misfits, they had to hide. This movie talks about the idea of being brave enough to find your own identity, to follow your own path and to find yourself. For me, the movie is about self-care, self-love, and there’s no way you can’t relate with that. I don’t know the parallel with gambling, but at the same time, gambling and being queer in that time was it was a way that you could get caught and get fucked at the same time if somebody caught you cheating [at gambling]. I think that could be like a mirror into it.
What can you say about your character having played him as a representation in queer media now?
Calva: Being Mexican with Latino representation, being queer, I’ve played queer characters more than once. I think there’s no way you can relate and find the core of a character in something as deep as love. Mexican representation or being queer, we are all human. The way I approach the character is he’s a lonely guy, someone that’s been strong his whole life. He’s struggling and fighting for his identity, but he can fall in love just as easily as you or me.
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