Just two miles outside of their destination, the Cadillac that star Lily Gladstone was driving for director Morrisa Maltz’s “The Unknown Country” ran out of gas amid a 2,200-mile road trip, the pair recently told IndieWire. And just days before their film was set to be released, SAG-AFTRA went on strike, leaving Gladstone unable to promote the passion project in its homestretch.
“The Unknown Country,” an independent road trip movie that blends documentary and narrative elements to gorgeous and profound effect, is Maltz’s debut feature and is finally hitting theaters Friday after premiering at SXSW 2022. It’s also the type of movie that might struggle to find any sort of wider audience, if not for Gladstone’s involvement.
For months, Gladstone had this week circled on her calendar for promotion. But, per the strike rules laid out by SAG-AFTRA, actors are unable to promote past, present, or future projects produced by struck companies. That most notably includes Gladstone’s upcoming turn in Martin Scorsese’s much-anticipated “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which she is currently unable to discuss in interviews.
But there are exceptions available if a film’s producers are truly independent (i.e. not aligned with any AMPTP-affiliated company) and have agreed to sign an interim agreement (colloquially known as a “waiver”). The guild has prioritized films that were in the midst of production when the strike began, with dozens of films getting the green light to resume.
Just this week, “The Unknown Country” became the first project to be approved for promotion specifically, something that a number of movies set to premiere at the fall festivals are hoping to receive as well. The waiver allowed Gladstone and Maltz not just a last-minute chance to sit down with IndieWire, but also to host a local screening in South Dakota, where part of the movie was filmed.
The event was miles away from Hollywood, had no professional photography, and saw Gladstone and Maltz doing their own hair and makeup. Suddenly, they are able to promote the movie in the same grassroots way they shot it.
“It’s a real moment of equity when our union that is so concerned with our quality of life as a worker is also concerned with these films that highlight these marginalized circles, these quiet small corners, the small independent lens that is really community-grown and very grassroots,” Gladstone said. “There’s no way that the studios would have touched this story. This story only happened because people gave so much to make it happen.”
“The Unknown Country” is exactly the type of movie SAG-AFTRA would love to prove is still possible outside of the studio system, the kind that should be elevated during this complicated time. It had a five-person crew. When he wasn’t shooting, cinematographer Andrew Hajek was also the one washing dishes, while one producer was the one tasked with cooking everyone scrambled eggs.
Maltz filmed the project largely without a formal script and over the span of three years, with Gladstone committing to keep her hair the same length that entire time to help ease any continuity issues. Upon applying for the interim agreement, Maltz had to share her production company to prove she was not with the AMPTP. Its name is just “Morrisa Maltz LLC.”
“The Unknown Country” promotional waiver is not even the only waiver Maltz has received. The filmmaker double-dipped and also received a production waiver for a spiritual sequel to the film, currently known as “The Untitled Jazzy Project,” that likewise features Gladstone and some of the figures from the first film. The film wrapped production last week.
On both that project and “The Unknown Country,” Maltz is working with non-actors and filming their stories as a seamless mix of documentary and narrative storytelling. Gladstone is the conduit for a variety of vignettes, landscapes, and experiences from a lesser-known region of the country. Gladstone even got a story credit for her contribution as a performer shaping what the narrative would become.
In “The Unknown Country,” Gladstone plays Tana, a young woman on a trip from her home in Minnesota to Texas. The purpose of her journey isn’t clear until the end, except it’s clear from that start that she’s grappling with the loss of a grandmother. Maltz went into filming with merely that premise: beginning and end, everything in-between was up for grabs and pieced together as she followed Gladstone exploring the Midwest, with Maltz evoking feelings and emotions rather than plot points.
“[Lily’s] an incredible human being, and she’s an incredible actor, and when you put those two things together, you get someone who’s walking into these situations, who is incredibly warm, incredibly kind, and they don’t come off as ‘An actor just suddenly came to Spearfish, South Dakota,’” Maltz said. “When you put that with these first-time actors, real people, it created a very comfortable environment. Lily was able to guide them within the scene as to what we needed to get to see the story very naturally.”
Gladstone added, “It’s kind of like improv. There’s the rules of the scene, and then you flesh it out and together find a way to resolve it and get to the end. It’s an incredibly fun way to work that almost only happens in like black box theater or when groups of friends get together. I really love nuance, I really love minimalism, so having a chance to bring that exciting factor of finding the story as you go and creating and driving the story, capture it while you’re doing that in a film way, it was terrifying, but it’s the kind of thing that I really believe and really love doing, especially when you’re working with a lens that Morrisa has.”
The story is populated with encounters along the road with real people, filmed in a verité doc-style, including a handful of interviews done through voiceover. One of the women, Lainey Bearkiller, is a producer on the film and a friend of Maltz’s, and the film shows her real-life wedding on screen, even though the fictional Tana is a guest. Bearkiller’s young daughter Jasmine (or “Jazzy”) is also featured in this movie and the follow-up feature and has one small line that was fed to her, though you might not know which while watching the film.
Maltz even took the major risk of not obtaining releases from her film’s subjects until she could show them the finished product, something that she says reflected the truly collaborative process of the film. Maltz said it’s about “making it with the community and having them in control of their stories,” which she admits would never be possible to risk if it was a larger film.
“That’s something anybody who’s working within native communities needs to know about and think about,” Gladstone added of getting the subject’s informed consent. “This was something that happened after the fact, but it also was something that happened when people were able to look at the footage and then say, ‘Yeah, I like that. I’ll sign it now.’”
Before joining the film, Gladstone was wary of yet another filmmaker attempting to turn an (air quotes) “real lens” into what reservation life is like. She’s seen too many examples of “poverty porn” or “glorified personal artist’s statements” that pressure indigenous communities to reveal moments they’d rather not have a broad audience see. But she ultimately was moved by test footage Maltz shot, and she related to the universal story of loss, love, and a respect for elders, something that she says is a marginalized story and highly important to native culture.
The concern Gladstone is weighing right now though are the optics of promoting a film while everyone else is on strike. She acknowledges she’s in a “strange position,” but is excited to see how other grassroots films like hers will shape future union agreements and the stories that people seek out.
“The hope is that [this] will this be a good resurgence for independent film, and I’m so grateful that SAG sees it that way, too. It gives us a lot more leverage as a union to say that there are people that believe in the work that actors do, that believe in the work that writers do, that will meet the demands that our union wants,” Gladstone said. “That’s part of what this whole strike is about, is the storyteller is the heart of it. There’s a lot of ways to be a storyteller in the kind of work that we do, and they’re all vital, they’re all important, and they’re all worth having a good quality of life.”
“The Unknown Country,” a Music Box Films release, is in theaters now.
