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You’ve never seen a sports drama like Rez Ball, but you’ve also absolutely seen a sports drama like Rez Ball. Directed by Sydney Freeland and co-written with Reservation Dogs co-creator Sterlin Harjo, the film is named for a style of basketball that has primarily developed among Indigenous communities in the U.S. Southwest. It’s characterized by its quick pace, aggressiveness, and the agility of its players, many of whom are high school students. The culture around rez ball, as it’s known, is also particularly intense, drawing crowds and adoration similar to that typically associated with professional athletes. But that also means that these players must deal with the dark side of “celebrity” as well, including harassment and ire from opposing teams and their supporters.
Rez Ball, out September 27 on Netflix, illustrates those epic highs and lows of high-school basketball via the Chuska Warriors, a boys’ team on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico who must regroup over the course of a season in the wake of a collective personal tragedy. The classic sports drama DNA is absolutely present in the movie: When we talk over Zoom, Freeland names Love & Basketball, Hoosiers, and Friday Night Lights as inspirations. Rez Ball is an addition to that canon that lovingly pays tribute to its predecessors, while also expanding the idea of what a sports drama can be: queer, Indigenous, and radical in its commitment to telling those stories without apology or much explanation for outsiders.
As Freeland tells me over a Zoom call, Rez Ball, a work of fiction, was “inspired by” a series of New York Times articles by Michael Powell, who had spent some time documenting the phenomenon of rez ball before eventually writing a book about the subject. But ultimately, that journalistic work presented a very “outside in” perspective, as Freeland puts it. “And so, for us, it was really about like, ‘How can we tell this story from the inside out?’” she says.
Ahead of the film’s streaming premiere, Freeland talked with Them about the importance of letting marginalized communities tell their own stories, shooting a film where she grew up, and her own experiences playing high school rez ball.
Rez Ball does a really good job of balancing context for non-Navajo viewers while also showcasing cultural elements more seamlessly. How did you strike that balance of “outside in” and “inside out?”
In our conversations, we talked a lot about how there’s always the white savior in movies with people of color: Michelle Pfeiffer goes into the inner city, or Hillary Swank teaches people poetry or whatever the fuck. Even something like Hoosiers, it’s Gene Hackman as the big-city coach who’s going to come out to the country and teach these rubes how to play the ball game the right way.
One of the big things for us was we didn’t want to have somebody from the outside as a coach. Also, Sterlin and I come from matriarchal cultures, and we loved the idea of having the coach being a woman, but being unapologetic about it. On the reservation, that scenario wouldn’t be that radical. When you have a coach character who’s from the community and the team runs into adversity and they have to overcome certain things, the coach has to find solutions from within.
In the writing process, as you’re sort of pulling on these threads, then that’s where you get the idea for something like, “She’s going to take them to sheep camp, and it’s going to become a team-bonding exercise.” And then that’s going to plant the idea with Jimmy to ask the question, “What if we call plays in Navajo?” That one decision had a snowball effect, and it really lent itself back to that inside-out approach.
We tried to infuse some of my personal experiences into the story as well. During my senior year, we were driving to the district championships, and it was probably about a three-hour drive. We got a flat tire on the way to the game. The bus pulled over and the assistant coach got on the bus, very somber, very serious, and said, “Everybody off the bus, we’re going to circle up.” Then he lit some sage and started smudging us all. “Rival team, they put a hex on us, and that’s why we got a flat tire.” And everyone was like, “Oh no, we gotta protect ourselves from getting witched by the rival team.” Our assistant coach would go into locker rooms ahead of time and cleanse them.
What was it like to shoot a movie where you grew up?
There’s a funny thing about working on a production, whether it’s TV or film: you don’t really have a lot of chances to enjoy or bask in the location. A production is a production is a production. So you could be in downtown New York, or you could be deep on the reservation, or you could be in the favelas in Brazil, and it’s still going to be the same.
So for Rez Ball, I actually had to make conscious efforts to step off the set and be like, “Oh, wow, we’re back. We’re shooting in the place I grew up in. We’re telling a Navajo story on the reservation in Shiprock. This is special.” The community that we shot in, Shiprock, is called that because of the geographical landmark Shiprock. I went to high school about 45 minutes away, and every weekend we would drive in the bus by Shiprock. It’s one of the visual cornerstones and motifs of our entire film. So there were definitely moments where I had to sit back and soak it in.
One of the big things for me about coming back home is the silence. Growing up, the silence could be terrifying, but now, coming from Los Angeles and then Atlanta and then New York, then being back in the reservation, it was actually very centering and grounding. We tried to build that into the film, where these characters have moments where they’re just sitting in silence and there’s a sort of a peace to that. I don’t think you don’t get that little bit of authenticity shooting on a soundstage.
I loved the way that music was woven throughout Rez Ball. Could you speak to the role that music plays in the film?
I grew up listening to basically rap and country, and it was completely normal. You drive with your friends, you listen to Wu-Tang Clan, and then you pop in the George Strait CD, no one bats an eye. When I’m creating a project and pitching it, I’ll create these playlists that are an audio landscape of the film. So my playlist for Rez Ball was basically rap and country. Once we had the kids in, I was thinking, “Does this dynamic still exist?” And [with] these kids, it was like nothing had changed in 20 some odd years. In between takes, they were listening to this country song, “Chicken Fried.” They would play it on their iPhones, and they’re all singing along to it, and we actually put it into the film.
In addition to that, Native music was a big thing that we wanted to incorporate as well. There’s a band called The Halluci Nation that’s sort of like EDM meets powwow music. There’s this native rapper named Travis Thompson — I loved his aesthetic. It really fit our film, it really fit what we were going for. He did both an existing song and an original song for us. So we got to have the best of all worlds: some rap, some country, and then also some Indigenous artists as well.
Overall, it seems like every aspect of Rez Ball was so deeply considered. What aspect of the film are you proudest of?
I think the kids that we found. The casting feels a little bit like a culmination of a bunch of different experiences. I was able to be on the set for the first season of Pose, and there were all these questions of, “Can you have a television series that’s led by trans women of color? Are these people out there? Are these actors out there for these roles?” And obviously now in hindsight, yes, the talent is Emmy Award-winning level. Same with Reservation Dogs, where it was essentially all first-time actors carrying a TV show, though Devery [Jacobs] is a little more established.
With every one of these experiences, the question is, “Are these people out there? Do they exist?” And every single time, when they’re “found,” it’s sort of like, “We caught lightning in a bottle!” At a certain point, being privy to these experiences, you have to ask yourself, is that lightning in a bottle? Or have these people just never been given the opportunity before?
With Rez Ball, it was sort of like, “Okay, we need 10 kids. They have to be Indigenous and they have to be able to play basketball.” To say I was confident would be an overstatement, but I was like, “I know these people are out there. We’re going to have to roll up our sleeves. We’re going to have to go find them.”
We put out a casting call, not quite knowing what to expect. It wasn’t a traditional audition, because not only did people have to put themselves on tape saying the lines and everything, but they also had to shoot a layup, shoot a three-pointer, and shoot a free throw and film themselves doing that. We got 5,000 submissions. From that 5,000, we culled that down to our top 250 at one point. And so long story short is that we found our 10 players.
One of the things I’m really proud of is that these kids, they’re from the communities they’re portraying. They’re actually playing basketball. There are no doubles, there’s no second unit, there’s no stunts. These kids are actually doing the thing. I think they showed up and showed out in a really great way, and I’m really proud of them. I think some of them are going to have careers and some of them, their lives could be changed from this.
Throughout your work, there’s such a respect and reverence for young people and their abilities to persevere through difficult circumstances. That shines through so much in Rez Ball, and it also makes me think that you would direct an amazing film about trans kids someday.
Someday. Someday, maybe sooner rather than later.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Rez Ball streams on Netflix September 27.
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