[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] On Story is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

"On Story" is also brought to you in part by the Bogle Family Vineyards, six generation farmers and third generation winemakers based in Clarksburg, California.

Makers of sustainably grown wines that are a reflection of the their family values since 1968.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story," a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators and filmmakers.

This week on "On Story," "Lawmen: Bass Reeves," co-creator Chad Feeehan, and series directors, Christina Alexandra Voros, and Damien Marcano, join us to discuss their revival of the television western.

- Growing up in the Caribbean, we don't make the media, we only import it.

So growing up, I used to watch "The Lone Ranger," I used to watch a lotta westerns.

You know I come from a place that if you went to see "Star Wars" I think the double feature was a western, and it was just this black and white pointless movie that we watched, and we would all sit and be cowboys in the theater, and start play shooting at each other.

But I have a also a very open mind, because we weren't necessarily trying to make the western I was watching with my grandfather, you know we were trying to make something current.

[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [typewriter dings] - How did this actually occur from the recognition of this story, and going to try to pitch it, and get it done, and get it out there?

- David Oyelowo has been trying to make this project since 2014.

And somewhere along the lines, he brought the project to David Glasser and Taylor Sheridan who then turned around and sold it to Paramount+.

And Taylor recommended me to David as a writer.

I grew up in Fort Worth, and had heard stories about Bass as a child.

And those stories took root in my consciousness, and then David Oyelowo invited me to dinner.

And over the course of a four-hour dinner, not only did I make a life-long friend, but I learned a lotta things about Bass that I didn't know, about the nooks and crannys of his life that aren't regularly reported, I learned about where the myth of the man both converged with and separated from reality.

And I quickly became obsessed, I consumed any information that I could find, opened a writers room, wrote the pilot, and they green lit the show off the pilot.

[typewriter dings] - So let's talk about the pilot that you establishing this world, and how y'all decided how that, what that pilot's gonna be, and what part of this story that you were gonna focus on as the launch for him.

And how you were setting things up for the rest of the season?

- Doing the research, and learning that Bass was forced to accompany George Reeves into the Civil War on the side of the confederacy, learning that he was at the Battle of Pea Ridge, learning that he escaped enslavement over a dispute around a card game with George, and then learning that he was a runaway with the American Indians in Indian territory.

For me, that was one of the most inciting incidents, exciting inciting incidents that I've ever heard of for a character.

- Brave men of the eleventh, get together, god damn!

[guns firing] There's not to make reply, there's not to reason why, there's but to do and die.

[guns firing] You will follow me and you will fire.

[guns firing] Charge!

[guns firing] [tense music] [guns firing] - Hyaaaa!

- And so immediately knew that you know we wanted to start the narrative there, and Sydney had written two historical fiction novels out of a set of three.

And then the first one really captured a lotta those incidents in a beautiful way.

And so option Sydney's work and then adapted it from there.

- And who directed the pilot?

- I did.

- So the card game, there were a couple of really like wow moments in this.

[tense music] - Oooooh, that was a close one.

You don't play poker like I thought you could shoot them Yankee's, but that was a good game.

- Master, I had a queen.

That there queen of hearts.

- You think you did what?

- I played a queen of hearts, I had it.

- Oh, there's only one queen of hearts in this deck.

I had it.

You saw it.

Do you understand?

Now you must not know what a queen looks like.

- You cheated me.

- Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with us, service as men pleasers, but singleness of heart fearing god.

- A false manners is abomination to the law, but a death sentence!

- Your tone-- - That is just a lie!

[yelling continues] - It was a kind of a shocker, and a very emotional scene, and obviously part of the lore of the story.

And I'd just like to hear how you decided, how y'all were gonna essentially set that up.

And George Reeve's character.

- This pilot was my first pilot as a director, and when you read through a script such as this one, that opens with various Civil War battles, and then has these like diamond like scenes that are so compact with drama and nuance of character, it's a little intimidating.

You know, being tasked with shooting the Civil War in four days is the kind of thing that can keep you up at night.

To be tasked with that card game scene with two actors who were less in themselves as artists, would've been a very different experience.

When you have people who are as remarkably talented as David O and Shea Whigham, you kind of get to sit back and slightly nudge this way, or slightly nudge that way, but so much is coming from the research they've done, the deep process that they've been through to get themselves to that point.

I think we were all incredibly nervous just because it's such a pivotal moment in the script, and it needed to be as it was on the page, and it was.

I think what both David and Shea brought to that scene is nothing short of 1000% of themselves as artists.

[typewriter dings] - Usually, you know, when you're making fiction, you're trying to get the actor to react to the character that has been created on the page, but in this particular case, you have this extra layer of you all having to ensure that the historical fact is represented in addition to that character on the page, right?

To making sure that something in here isn't going to be, you know, somehow misunderstood or misrepresented once it goes from the page to that.

- You know, so my way is always trying to have that human discussion before we go into a scene.

Because I was always the person that fell asleep on the history lesson, all right, I probably failed every history class I ever took.

[audience laughing] And, you know, I didn't take this job because of the historical reference.

I come from a different place, right, I'm a man from a rock in the middle of the Caribbean Isl-- in Caribbean Sea.

But I got here, and I started realizing how important this story was to everyone.

So yeah, the historical truth of it is very important, but I also believe, they were able to write something that without me knowing any of this history, I connected to as a human being.

So therefore, that matched my process, and I think that's how I at least attacked each scene that we did.

Because I didn't feel like we were shooting history from the wide lens, saying oh okay, some bad stuff happened to this group of people and it was done by this group of people.

We actually went in with the close lens, and it was about what happened to this man, and what happened to this family.

And guess what?

I'm a man with a family, so I kinda understand that.

- I've been doing westerns for a couple of years now, and I think to your initial sort of query about doing historical pieces, period pieces, I think one of the things that is a real like deal breaker in their success, is their accuracy.

But if someone goes, "That's not a period saddle," or, "They didn't have those light fixtures then," or, "That location doesn't look, you know, accurate to the way roads were made."

You know that kind of thing can immediately pull someone out of the story.

And there are so many of those details that can pull someone out of the story, that it's really, not only did we feel safe because we had the incredible work done by the writing team, but every department head brought it, and made us feel protected as directors that there wasn't gonna be a textile that was wrong.

And when you don't have to worry about that, you really get to focus on performance.

- Just in when we started talking about doing this panel, I just went to Google, which is what everybody does right?

But there's very little on Google here, when you consider how big a piece of history this should be.

What is lore, and what is actual fact?

And where you found that, that must've been a big part of what your production team is worrying about, and what your writers room looks like, is like how do we identify what's true?

- First step was to hire an expert, and that man is named Sydney Thompson.

And Sydney spent, I believe, a decade of his life researching Bass.

And from there, you know there are these sort of centennial moments in Bass' life that we do know.

And we use those as pillars to lay the foundation of the narrative.

And there's a lot of gaps in the history of Bass Reeves, and so in order to fill in those gaps, we were driven by the thematics that we wanted to explore with the Seminoles, and Black Seminoles, more specifically, it was a part of history I didn't really know that much about and became obsessed with it, so, said, okay, we believe that Bass likely hid with the Seminole's because the Seminole's were most receptive to you know people with Black skin.

[dramatic somber music] [birds chirping] [gun firing] [birds chirping] - Seminole?

[birds chirping] - Runaway.

- And, you know, the Seminole's, and people who escaped enslavement lived together.

And so that's how we landed on that particular story line in the pilot.

In the show, you'll see some of the famous stories that are all over Google.

You'll see some of the lesser-known stories that Sydney and a few other sources turned us onto.

And then you'll see, you know, a fair share of fictional stories that fill in the in between.

[typewriter ding] - His family's a big part of this, and he was married to the same woman for a long time right, I mean until she died, right?

So let's talk about how she's woven into your show.

- Initially, you know, the concept of Bass having to leave his family for four, five, six, seven, eight weeks at a time, was something that I identified with, and something that I wanted to infuse in the narrative, about the cost of career on a marriage, the cost of a career on a family, the cost of traveling like that on your own personal psyche.

And so that's sort of where it started.

And then I felt like there was a huge deficiency in this genre of women with agency and self purpose.

And so really wanted to honor the women that have influenced my life so greatly with the character of Jennie.

- You know, it is the most perfect example of behind every great man is potentially a greater woman, right?

And Jennie is that.

Jennie is his rock that the work takes him farther and farther away from.

And so you have her side of that as well.

And in order for his family that is the most important thing to him, to thrive, she has to be as steadfast and strong.

[door opens and closes] - Bass.

Are you hurt?

- I done messed up for all of us.

- Oh, Lord.

Bass, look at me, look, you gonna run now, you gonna take a horse, and you gonna run far from here, far from all this.

- No.

- Yes, you are.

I ain't watching you get strung up and dead, I ain't, so you gonna run.

You gonna run and never look back.

Promise me.

I'm your woman, do what I say, promise me!

[dramatic somber music] - I promise.

[dramatic somber music] - I talked to David about the fact that every time Bass left home, and this is something that I think is even current, for those of us who have to live our lives on the road.

You know I'm here in Texas talking to you guys today, all for my family, right?

For the show as well, but really, I think we're each doing this for our family.

And there is a weird little thing that happens, which is that you expect your family to be exactly the same way that you left them when you return home.

And imagine what that was like in the 1800s.

So you out on the road, you're fighting this, you're fighting, you're doing this on behalf of a badge that may or may not respect your emancipation in this country, and you're still wondering, what is going on with my family back home?

Lauren E. Banks is definitely a name to remember.

And I think the most amazing thing about the character, as we talk about him wanting his family to be the same, she was such a tough human being that she only got tougher the longer he stayed away.

And reading it, sometimes I didn't understand it, but then when I would see her perform it, and I would see us go after the truth and how she felt in the moment, it was just brilliant.

And we realized that it was her at home with all these kids, she took care of the livestock, she took care of the land, she was pretty much mother and father while he was gone.

- You don't need to look any farther to frame women who lived 200 years ago in the West, than by looking at women now who live in the West.

You look at women who are ranchers, or horse women, or work in agriculture, and you see how strong they are, and then you extrapolate and go, "Well if you have to be that strong to do it now, how strong did you have to be to do it back then?"

There isn't a lot of historical documentation of what their inner thought process was.

And then you imagine that without electricity, or internet, or grocery stores, and it gives you a little bit of room to make these women as strong as you want them to be, because the reality is, they were probably stronger than that.

[typewriter dings] - Coming from the Caribbean, not having grown up with the, I mean every culture has its historical specifics, and certainly westerns are American.

So how do you approach that, because it does feel like it's something that you'd have to kinda absorb yourself in for a little while.

- Growing up in the Caribbean, we don't make anything, we don't make the media, we only import it.

So growing up, I used to watch "The Lone Ranger."

I used to watch a lotta westerns.

You know I come from a place that if you went to see "Star Wars," I think I remember when I went to see "Star Wars" I think the double feature was a western.

And it was jut this black and white pointless movie that we watched, and we would all sit and be cowboys in the theater, and start play shooting at each other.

But I have also a very open mind, because we weren't necessarily trying to make the western I was watching with my grandfather.

You know we were trying to make something current.

And I think this beautiful state just every day lent a 360 degree view of yeah we could really make something special.

- This is very much a western of a time period.

You know you're having to capture the landscape in this, to some degree, as a character in your story.

So how are you all approaching that from the production and direction perspective?

- I learned about the State of Texas, this is the best story I can give you that.

I got here, and that's what I didn't know about making a western, especially trying to make one here.

In the six months I spent here, I experienced a year of life.

I went from snow, to sleet, to not tornado warnings, but tornadoes.

And there were days that we weren't allowed by the State of Texas, who was probably the number one on our call sheet.

Like, we were like Texas didn't wanna that [audience laughs] you know, today.

Texas pushes you into a corner, and I think as a artist, you may just take a couple paces to the side and you'll see something else.

So I think that's sorta where it lent itself to me.

- When you're doing a show like this, the landscape becomes a character.

So much depends on your location team.

And the things that are offered up to you may be beautiful, but if it rains and you can't get there, you can't shoot that day.

And you can't tell the story of the land unless you have people who are willing to get dirty, and tired, and wait out that four-hour thunderstorm, or stay up all night to shoot that scene in the morning because the location is so beautiful and you can't go back there.

- So what do you, like how does your production design, like your team, 'cause the outside is the outside, you can control what you create inside, but you know when you're choosing these places to shoot?

- I remember a specific day, I think I told Chad about this, where we went looking for a tree.

And we had been out at Bosque Ranch for weeks.

I think at this point, Christina and I, that's the other part of this right, when you watch this, the location is such a character that you will never see us take the foot off the gas pedal of like let's make this little be different, the terrain has to feel different, we have to feel like he has traveled.

There was just that constant care about every frame.

A piece of dirt was not just a piece of dirt on this show, it was very important.

- Well and of course with a western, that's a huge, I mean 'cause there's so much that you have to worry about.

How did they dress?

How specific was it?

Where did they live?

You know, so in doing historical non fiction, which is clearly the space you guys are in, like I'd just like to hear from each of you, what's the one unexpected challenge of being in that space?

- I would say, on a personal and very emotional level, you know and maybe this happened because I didn't understand all the history, but the history that I've been taught as far as this country goes, is the history given to an immigrant right?

Right, I moved here.

And I've always, like I said, been given that version of there was a group of people, and there was another group of people, and then this one did this, and some bad stuff happened, and whatnot.

So you learn history.

When you go to work on history, and the history ends up being so real, right, like so true to the point.

Everything that we've told you today from our greens department, to our production designers, to the costume making, to the writing, to everything right, this was all real.

My job at that point is just to go in there and tell some camera operators where to be, what I'd like to see, what I hope to get outta the scene.

The unexpected challenge was, I didn't realize I would get so emotional.

And I've shot a lot, I've shot tough scenes, I've shot things that I probably I've never shown my children, you know, it's not appropriate.

This is the first thing that I've been a part of in this town, you know this Hollywood town, that I actually do wanna show my children, because I think I also owe them the explanation of man this really moved your father.

You know I had to wait til I was 40 something years of age to say that.

But like I finally learned this very important chapter of American history.

Yeah, it was kinda touching, because you I think it becomes so real that you can't help but envision a former 150-year-old you know sooner version of yourself.

And you ask yourself man, like if it was me, what would I do?

And sometimes I would ask myself, because these scenes felt so real, and honestly they would just get to me.

We got through them because I had people to lean on, but it definitely moved me, and I hope it does the same for you all.

- And, like you said, what would I have done?

What would David had done?

What would, and that is the only thing that connects us you know, our sympathetic nervous systems to something that happened 200 years ago, 150 years ago, is by trying to draw on our own humanity to connect those pieces.

And I think that was the most difficult part, is with a story this important, you are obviously compelled to do it the greatest justice that you are capable of.

And in those places where you have to step off the path because the path ends, you need to trust your instincts, and the instincts of your fellow creators to get you to that next stepping stone that you know is concrete.

- I also didn't expect to get nearly as emotional as I did.

I mean I cried a number of times while we were filming, and you know we shot on a plantation that's still standing in Nacogdoches Texas.

And we shoot this card game scene that y'all have heard so much about.

And started crying, started crying because of the dark history of this country.

And David came off set and was also crying.

And to be able to embrace each other, and comfort each other in that moment, was just something that I didn't expect.

[typewriter dings] - I happened upon a 19-year-old young Black man, I forgot where he was from.

And before the interview ever really kicked off, he was just so excited to tell me, "Bro, you got me watching [bleep] westerns.

[audience laughs] "We don't watch westerns bro."

And I realized in that moment, I think maybe that's the why now, because why not man?

- We all came onto this project after David Oyelowo had been pushing for it for years.

And I think why now, is it's an incredible story of persistence, and it's something that I have to remind myself often, that the difference between being able to tell that story, getting to that place you wanted to be, making that movie, and not, is a whole lotta not quitting.

And I think if at any point in this process, David had given up, we wouldn't be telling this story now.

[typewriter dings] [Narrator] You've been watching "Inside the Making of 'Lawmen: Bass Reeves'" on "On Story."

"On Story" is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story Project that also includes the "On Story" radio program, podcast, book series, and the On Story archive accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

To find out more about "On Story" and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.

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