Wind River Brings Wyoming Noir To The Big Screen (VIDEO)

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Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner star in Wind River, Courtesy ofThe Weinstein Company.

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The Wyoming wilderness has provided a backdrop for Hollywood films since the early days of the medium. A 1914 silent film adaptation of Owen Wister’s The Virginian, dropped the action right in Medicine Bow, Wyoming and the surrounding areas. Directed by the legendary Cecil B. Demille, 1914’s adaptation may have been set in Wyoming, but according the the Internet Movie Database, was likely filmed in Southern California.

Some films have been set in the region, as well as filmed in Wyoming; the 2012 film Django Unchained saw cult film icon Quentin Tarantino filming his characters in the snows around Jackson. Rocky IV from 1985, saw the exact same snowy, picturesque landscape substituted for the harsh, unforgiving wilderness of Siberia. Further yet, Hell’s Half Acre, about 40 miles from Casper, proved to be the perfect alien world, when Neil Patrick Harris and Casper Van Dien squared off against a race of giant bugs in Starship Troopers.

Wind River, the latest film from Hell or High Water writer/director Taylor Sheridan, was filmed over the course of 5 months from January 2016 to May 2016 in Park City, Utah. “When I embarked on Wind River, I viewed it as the conclusion of a thematic trilogy that explores the modern American frontier,” Sheridan said, in a statement released by the film’s distribution company, The Wienstein Company. “Beginning with the epidemic of violence along the US, Mexico border in Sicario and then shifting to focus on the immense wealth and poverty colliding in the Comanchería region of West Texas in Hell or High Water, Wind River is the final chapter and catharsis of this trilogy.”

While not filmed within Wyoming’s borders, the backdrop of Wind River was important to Sheridan’s theme. “It is a brutal place where the landscape itself is an antagonist,” he says. “It is a place where addiction and murder kills more than cancer, and rape is considered a rite of passage for girls on the cusp of womanhood. It is a place where the rule of law gives way to the law of nature. No place in North America has changed less in the past century, and no place in America has suffered more from the changes that have taken place.”

Wind River is a thriller that follows a rookie FBI agent who teams with a local game tracker, with deep community ties and a haunted past, to investigate the murder of a local girl on an Native American Reservation in the hopes of solving her mysterious death.

The film stars Elizabeth Olsen (Godzilla, The Avengers) and Jeremy Renner (The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Arrival) along with John Bernthal (Daredevil, The Walking Dead), and Graham Greene (Longmire, Dances With Wolves).

Authenticity was a major goal for Director of Photography, Ben Richardson, whose first conversation with Sheridan focused on “Nature as the apex predator.” However, the quest for truthful representation of the brutality and villainous nature of Wind River brought some challenges to the production as well.

“In the early part of the shoot, we were managing freezing temperatures, thin air, and regular snow storms. Although we sought it out, the thickness of the winter was a constant battle. All our equipment and crew needed to travel on snowmobiles and snowcats from a truck-accessible base camp, and at our locations it was a constant challenge not to disturb the very snow we were there to shoot,” said Richardson. “Towards the end of the shoot, spring was upon us, and the challenge became maintaining that sense of isolation and cold while the winter snow melted out from underneath us.”

Wind River is currently in limited release and will be expanding to wider release during August.

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