Thandiwe Newton stars like Sandra in God’s land, 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,” said the director Julian Higgins, who also co-wrote with Shay Ogbonna. “I think the crux of it is the question of what happens to a person who realizes that the kind of ethics and morals they’ve used to live their lives aren’t getting the results they want. In the short story, it is a confrontation mainly about generations of men. In our film, we changed the nature of this main character to access a lot more of the things we wanted to explore and talk about… the film addresses many of the pressing issues of our time, but hopefully not. in a way that feels preachy, but really just dramatized by the characters.”
This certainly takes place as we watch Newton’s character develop and unfold as she teaches in a public school as she endures her mother’s death and invaders (Joris Jarsky, Jefferson White) who cause her trouble when she asks them to stop. hunting her property, in a town with only one sheriff within hundreds of miles.
Thandiwe Newton in God’s Land
“I never really write with actors in mind,” Higgins explained, “and with Shay we talked as a fun game about who might be playing these roles, but we weren’t writing with anyone in mind. We just wanted to try and create juicy characters. create that would attract good actors when the time came. Sure, if you write a specific western, you don’t think you’re going to get Thandiwe Newton. But I can’t imagine anyone else who would be better. And frankly, as a collaborator at the building this movie and this character, we felt so lucky because she was so invested from the start and she came up with all kinds of great ideas.
Some of the ideas, Higgins continued, were about the choices her character would make, which, given her perspective, could be of great benefit to her. “I’m a white man, Shay is a black man – we’re both men. There’s a lived experience that we’re very well aware of that we don’t have. Fortunately, she really identified with the character we created. But the conversations we had about how to kind 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 been through… So you bring in people who know more about this than you do to inform the process and make sure it doesn’t get screwed up… there’s a scene towards the end where she goes to a bar, and i don’t want to give any away, but the scene was on a written differently. On the day Thandiwe showed up, she said, “I don’t think I would.” For me, that’s such a gift as a director, because in that moment I can say, ‘Okay, great, well, what would you do?’ And then I will start to learn… such a collaboration is very rare.”
Higgins went on to note that the rest of the cast were also noteworthy to work with. “Then the rest of the cast. Jeremy, Bob playing the sheriff… such a nice group of people. Jefferson White out Yellowstone. It was just fun.”
Meaning in God’s Land
Due to the dynamics between the characters in this film, there are plenty of emotional and racial undertones. We asked Higgins if there was anything in particular that he would like audiences to take away from watching the film.
“I believe what artists do is tell the truth about what they see. They may say something is beautiful, they may say something is tragic, they may say all kinds of things. But our responsibility to the public is to try to be honest and tell them the truth. And there can be disagreements about that, but that was how we approached writing the script. We wrote a couple of different endings before we got to the end of the movie. That was the end that is true for all of us. We wanted it to end differently, but it felt true to us. So our job, the end of the bargain is to be as truthful as possible… and the film is designed to challenge the audience in a way that hopefully is very entertaining and thought-provoking, but we actually want you to think about its meaning. My answer to that question is not really important. I know what it means to me, but I’m much more interested in what it means to the people watching it,” Higgins said.
God’s land comes to us from IFC movies and will hit theaters on September 16, 2022.