Thandiwe Newton stars as Sandra in God’s Country, a slow-burning thriller with an explosive ending. The film is based on the short story “Winter Light” by James Lee Burke.
“I read it in 2010,” commented director Julian Higgins, who also co-wrote alongside Shay Ogbonna. “I think at the heart of it is this question about what happens to a person who realizes that the sort of ethics and the morals that they’ve been using to live their life are not delivering the results that they want. In the short story, it’s a confrontation that’s mainly about generations of men. In our movie, we changed the nature of this main character to be able to access a lot more of the things we wanted to explore and talk about… the movie gets into a lot of the pressing issues of our time, but hopefully, not in a way that feels preachy, but actually just dramatized through the characters.”
This certainly takes place as we watch Newton’s character develop and unfold as she teaches at a public school while enduring the death of her mother and trespassers (Joris Jarsky, Jefferson White) who give her trouble when she asks them to stop hunting on her property, in a town that has only one sheriff within hundreds of miles.
Thandiwe Newton in God’s Country
“I never really write with actors in mind,” explained Higgins, “and with Shay, we talked sort of as a fun game about who could potentially play these roles, but we weren’t writing with anybody in mind. We really just wanted to try to create juicy characters that would attract quality actors when the time came. Of course, if you’re writing any spec Western, you don’t imagine you’re going to get Thandiwe Newton. But I can’t imagine anyone else who would be better. And frankly, as a collaborator in the process of building this movie, and this character, we felt so lucky because she was so invested from the very beginning, and she came with all kinds of amazing ideas.”
Some of the ideas, Higgins continued, were around the choices her character would make, of which she was able to be of large benefit given her perspective. “I am a white man, Shay is a black man — we’re both men. There’s a lived experience that we are very well aware that we don’t have. Fortunately, she really identified with the character that we created. But the conversations that we had about how to sort of fill these moments and make them feel authentic, I mean, this is her life. She and I had so many conversations about similar moments that she’s experienced… So, you bring in people who know more about this than you do to inform the process and make sure it’s not getting screwed up… there’s a scene towards the end where she goes to a bar, and I don’t want to spoil anything, but the scene was written in a different way. On the day, Thandiwe showed up, and she’s like, ‘I don’t think that’s what I would do.’ To me, that’s such a gift as a director. Because I get to say in that moment, ‘Okay, great, well, what would you do?’ And then I will start to learn… having that kind of collaboration is very rare.”
Higgins continued, noting that the rest of the cast was also remarkable to work with. “Then the rest of the cast. Jeremy, Bob playing the sheriff… such a lovely group of people. Jefferson White from Yellowstone. It was just fun.”
Meaning in God’s Country
Through the dynamics between characters in this film is plenty of emotional and racial subtext. We asked Higgins if there was anything in particular that he would like for audiences to take away from watching the film.
“I believe what artists do, is they tell the truth about what they see. They might be saying something is beautiful, they might be saying something is tragic, they might be saying any number of things. But our responsibility to the audience is to try to be straight and tell them the truth. And there may be disagreement on that, but that was how we approached writing the script. We wrote a number of different endings before we landed on the ending that is in the film. That was the ending that’s all true to us. We wanted it to end differently, but it felt true to us. So, our job, our end of the bargain is to be as truthful as we can… and the movie is designed to aim at challenging audiences in a way that is hopefully very entertaining and thought-provoking, but we actually want you to contemplate the meaning of it. My answer to that question isn’t really important. I know what it means to me, but I’m much more interested in what it means to the people that watch it,” said Higgins.
God’s Country comes to us from IFC Films and is set to release theatrically on September 16, 2022.
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