When I spoke to writer/director Taylor Sheridan on the phone, he was having a very good day. You see, the day previously, Sheridan landed an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for Hell or High Water. On top of that, his highly anticipated directorial effort Wind River had just premiered to positive response at the Sundance Film Festival (read Matt's review here). Having also written the phenomenal Sicario, Sheridan has quickly become one of the most exciting talents working today, and Wind River marks the beginning of a promising directing career.

The film is the third chapter in a thematic trilogy of sorts that ties to Sicario and Hell or High Water. It stars Jeremy Renner as a U.S. Fish & Wildlife agent living near the Wind River Indian Reservation who stumbles across a body in the rugged wilderness. The FBI send in a rookie agent, played by Elizabeth Olsen, to investigate the scene, and the two venture deeper and deeper into an unforgiving, treacherous landscape to try and solve the case.

Wind River is evocative of Sicario and Hell or High Water in that it plays with Western tropes, features richly drawn characters, and draws thematic resonance to the world we live in today. It’s also one hell of a good yarn.

Fresh off the premiere and Oscar announcement, I spoke to Sheridan while at Sundance for an extended conversation that covered everything from the hellish experience of actually making the movie in the snow, the challenges of telling a story about Native Americans as a white filmmaker, and when the idea for the film first materialized. We also discussed Soldado, the Sicario sequel that’s now filming, and how that follow-up came about. Sheridan teased some tantalizing plot details while also discussing the parallels between Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River. We even touched on the prospect of writing and/or directing a large-scale superhero movie, as Sheridan singled out Deadpool as one of his favorites of 2016.

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Image via Sundance

It was an entertaining conversation from my end, and I hope you find it just as fascinating. Read the full interview below. Wind River does not yet have a release date.

COLLIDER: Is it crazy having the Oscar nomination for Hell or High Water today after you premiere Wind River at Sundance?

TAYLOR SHERIDAN: Yeah, yeah, it is, it’s a lot. Are you here, are you at Sundance?

I am, just wrapping up. We leave tomorrow.

SHERIDAN: It’s been an interesting festival. It seems like every year for some reason –It probably won’t snow again for two months, but every time it’s Sundance, it attracts a blizzard. Have you noticed that?

It’s been insane this year, definitely more than I’ve ever seen before.

SHERIDAN: Yeah. Crazy.

I really enjoyed Wind River, and I hate to start with something so broad but I’m genuinely interested. When did you write this, how did this story first come about? Because it’s very different, at least aesthetically, from your past few scripts.

SHERIDAN: I finished Hell or High Water and started writing Wind River literally the next day. Yeah, literally the next day. It had been a story that I wanted to tell –I had actually started it and then kind of was hit with this thunderbolt that was Hell or High Water. I had the elements in my head and then one day I was just walking and it just struck me, so I started writing Hell or High Water. And as soon as I finished that then I went right back into Wind River.

How did the story evolve, is the finished film pretty much what you had in that first draft or your initial nugget of an idea?

SHERIDAN: Yeah, I shot the first draft. I think when you’re the writer/director it’s a lot of freedom, in some ways maybe too much. The movie came together, there was a window to shoot it, and the actors came into place, and we had to move so fast. I swear it was over before I realized it had started. It was a pretty intense experience.

When did you guys shoot?

SHERIDAN: We started shooting in March, and I was chasing snow. It was constantly melting, it was Spring time. So, I’d continually move locations and change locations and kept going higher, and higher, and higher and it kept getting harder, and herder to get the equipment to it. What’s traditionally a twelve-hour day to shoot would be four and a half hours of getting equipment in and then six hours of shooting. It was a really difficult shoot.

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Image via The Weinstein Company

What was kind of the overall shooting experience like? You’re coming off Sicario and Hell or High Water and here you are directing Wind River. Did the weather just make it impossibly difficult?

SHERIDAN: Impossibly difficult. Snowing on days when I needed it to be sunny, sunny on days when I needed it to snow. Yeah, impossible. And it’s funny because those things turn out to not matter, the audience doesn’t actually really care. That it’s snowing now and not snowing later, they don’t care. But you think that they will and so you panic about it.

What was truly great is that I honestly felt like I was watching Jeremy [Renner] do something really special, and I still believe that, I think his work was really, really rare in this and very nuanced. And so it was really fascinating to sit there and watch him take this journey and it was very easy to film, very easy to film him. And Lizzie [Elizabeth Olsen] as well, I just felt that the acting –I wish I could take credit for it. But I cast it really well and I just thought that they brought these characters to such depths.

You are an actor yourself, and the performances are terrific all around. Was it kind of daunting working with actors of this caliber, what was that experience like directing these people? Especially since Jeremy and Lizzie already had a working relationship before.

SHERIDAN: It was really easy. Jeremy is a pro, and a real giving actor, as is Lizzie, very open and no ego. Lizzie’s done a lot of –She’s kind of an indie queen, she’s worked with a ton of first-time directors, and I think Jeremy didn’t make me feel like one. He was extremely respectful and anything I asked him to try, he would, and I just can’t say enough good things about him.

You’ve obviously worked with a number of directors before as an actor, and then with Denis Villeneuve and David Mackenzie as a screenwriter. Was there a particular director that influenced your own approach to directing this the most?

SHERIDAN: Not that I’ve worked with. I spent most of my time as an actor in television, so directors in television—it’s such a machine that’s already in place that I don’t think you notice the direction as much on the set. But obviously there are filmmakers who have deeply influenced me, Michael Mann was very influential on me, Peter Berg on particular in Friday Night Lights and The Kingdom in the way he uses the camera was very influential on me. Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven I think might be the most influential of all on me.

They all have something in common which is that you’ll have moments of really tense action and then you have very big moments where people just talk and reflect. Some of the most fascinating scenes in Unforgiven for me is that scene with Gene Hackman where he’s talking about the Duke of Death that Richard Harris played and he’s basically demolishing this myth of this man very unwesternly, not what you expect in a western. And I think I tried to do the same thing.

The work from Ben Richardson on this film is really terrific, and I’m always curious about the relationship between directors and their cinematographers. What were some of your early conversations with him like, what did you want to capture and what did you guys hit upon as kind of the touchstones of how you wanted to visually tell this story?

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Image via CBS Films/Lionsgate

SHERIDAN: Well, we had to look at the realities of what we were doing first, which is shooting in the snow. And we didn’t have a lot of money, so we had to develop a style that allowed us to effectively cover the scenes –It’s a little hard to lay track down so you can see the snow, but we did a lot of gimble work, we laid tracks where we could. But a lot of it we had to be on the move. We wanted an energy to the visual that handheld gives you and we wanted to find places to be extremely still, that mixture, to hopefully help guide the audience.

But everything had to be built within the framework of what was possible. When you’re shooting on the side of a mountain, we weren’t gonna have a 5lbs camera on your shoulder. It’s one of the reason we did no Steadicam work, we just didn’t think it would be possible. We couldn’t figure out how anyone could move around with a Steadicam, so then Ben basically invented this gimble thing that rested on his chest, it looked like a BOSU ball with a chain on it. It was an interesting invention that we relied on quite a bit.

You’re working with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and the score for this thing is downright haunting. What was that experience like?

SHERIDAN: It was incredible. Their use of strings in all of their work to me is beautiful and haunting. I didn’t want at the end of the day what you would expect to hear in a movie that takes place on a reservation. I didn’t want big drums and flutes and all these things, I wanted it to feel like another world, strangely almost like a sci-fi horror movie that then kind of evolved into something more traditional and emotional. I think it’s a beautiful requiem kind of film, and when I first heard the score it was so bizarre and spare and just damming in spots and so cathartic. They’re really masters.

It almost feels alien from that first shot because it’s definitely not the score that I was expecting and you just have that stark haunting imagery of the girl running across the giant landscape. It comes through really well.

SHERIDAN: Thank you. I think that marriage of music and picture is so vital, especially in a film that’s almost exclusively exteriors. You want to give that sense of sound, you want –Also the sound design which Alan Murray did for me –who did Sicario and everything else and he’s nominated for an Oscar for Sully–, he helped magnify that strangeness and I just thought it was –I’m very, very proud of the score.

Absolutely. The film also offers a striking portrait of Native Americans and kind of their place in modern America. As a white writer and director, what were some of the challenges you faced in regards to being respectful to Native Americans in the film while also offering an honest portrait?

SHERIDAN: I spent a lot of time in Indian country and I have some very good friends that are very involved in the community. So I know it pretty well, I’ve stayed on reservations. So I felt comfortable showing that world because I’ve been in it, and I’ve been in it with people who lived there, who’ve suffered through these things. I decided to make Cory a white guy with a foot in that world because I didn’t feel I had the right necessarily to tell that story from a Native American point of view, even though I’ve somewhat been attacked for that. I just didn’t feel that I had that right at that time. It doesn’t mean someone can’t write from a point of view of another race, but if you’re gonna, you better do your homework, you better really live it in a way that you can honestly fairly tell that with all the nuance. I felt really comfortable talking from the point of view of someone who was married into that and who had suffered losses that they suffered, that I felt comfortable doing. But yeah, I’m writing a film that hopefully highlights real serious issues in a way that’s effective and respectful.

I think it comes across and I think you make a good point in that if you were writing a Native American protagonist it would feel like, “Why am I the person telling this story?”

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Image via Lionsgate

SHERIDAN: Yeah.

Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River all deal with law enforcement. Obviously I assume you’ve done plenty of research, but how do you balance accuracy with crafting an entertaining narrative?

SHERIDAN: I spent a lot of time. A lot of my family’s in law enforcement, so I know the nuance of it, and I’m a voracious reader and researcher and so that idea of jurisdiction, the idea of the militarization of police—which is really what Sicario is about—and this notion in Wind River which is when the laws of nature give way to the rule of law. When someone is so isolated from the consequences of their actions, how animalistic or humanistic are they? And there’s a very real jurisdictional gap that exists on reservations that I felt could be looked at. The movie’s not about that, but it’s definitely an element. So you want it to be plausible and you want it to be within the realm of possibility, and then obviously there’s gonna be dramatic license you’re gonna take.

With Wind River in particular, I had sent the screenplay to an FBI Agent and to the medical examiner in Lander, who brought in notes to make it more accurate. In the scene that you saw, the way that they have to get the body out is with a chainsaw. And in the first version that I wrote, I had them using this heat torch to melt her out, and the medical examiner’s like, ‘Well that’s stupid, you just wrecked all the DNA, screwed up the forensics.’ So I asked him what would you use, and he said, ‘chainsaw.’ So that’s how they do it.

With these three films as well, you’ve said before that Wind River completes a thematic trilogy. Do you still intend to play with Western tropes going forward or does this kind of complete that chapter?

SHERIDAN: I mean I grew up on Westerns—the funny thing is I haven’t actually written a Western yet—but I grew up on them, and I grew up in the west and I’m fascinated by the west. But there’s other things I wanna explore, other areas I want to explore. That doesn’t mean I won’t return to this world, but I don’t have an intention to know.

When it comes to Soldado, Sicario was my favorite film that year but being honest, when I heard there was going to be a sequel I didn’t really understand why. What was it that convinced you a sequel was worth doing? How did Sicario 2 come about? 

SHERIDAN: One of the producers called me and said, ‘If you were to do a sequel, how would you do it?’ and when he first brought it up I thought,’ Well of course you’re asking me.’ And then I had an idea, and I said, ‘Look you can’t really do a sequel, but I sure would love to see what happened if these guys didn’t have a chaperone. Because basically they’re operating within the United States, so I played with some actual laws that exist and found a way that they could operate more or less legally within the U.S. But they had a chaperone. What happens if they weren’t in the U.S. and they didn’t have a chaperone? How bad or good would that work out? You’ve seen Sicario, good isn’t going to factor into it too much.

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Image via Lionsgate

Well and we know that Emily Blunt’s character isn’t coming back. As you’re probably suggesting, does the follow-up still take the point of view of a law enforcement angle? Or are you taking that into a different direction?

SHERIDAN: I would say if Sicario is a film about the militarization of police and that blending over, this is removing the policing aspect from it. Does that make sense? I’m trying to not give anything away but also be truthful and give a sense of what it’s about. Unfortunately, there is still much to mine in this world and explore creatively. People are gonna think I have like a crystal ball—I don’t, but the current political climates are oddly timely to what Soldado confronts.

Which makes sense because Sicario works on so many different levels, but one is that if you take Emily Blunt’s character and have her stand in for the average American public that doesn’t know what the government is really doing, then you take that away, that’s a fascinating angle. 

SHERIDAN: Yeah. I haven’t spent anytime on set. I’ve seen some footage which looks quite powerful. There’s always a nervousness of a screenwriter of you don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what’s happening. Did they say it? Did they shoot it? I don’t know. There’s always that ‘someone’s got your baby, what are they doing with it?’. But I’m excited to see it come to light.

Has anyone approached you about Sicario 3 yet? Is that happening or is it wait and see? 

SHERIDAN: Who knows? I know what it would be if they did. I know exactly what it would be if they did.

Obviously when you write scripts like Sicario, Hell or High Water, and Wind River you’re going to be in demand, especially now with that Oscar nomination. Do you have any interest in tackling a big-budget Hollywood movie or large-scale genre movie of some sort in the future, either as a writer or director?

SHERIDAN: After shooting a movie in the snow, I would love a big budget (laughs). I would love it. But I want it to matter, you know? Not every film has to strike some social and political tones, I love to go to the movies to escape—Deadpool was one of my favorite movies last year. We’re entertainers, so I think it would be really liberating to tell an exciting tale. I don’t know if I’m capable of it, but who knows?

Well I think something that you do really well is you’re able to combine some genre aspect, some really thrilling story as the foundation, and then layer it with all this thematic resonance and rich characters. 

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Image via Lionsgate

SHERIDAN: I try. For me it’s really fun and really exciting for an audience to take a formula or a genre that they know really well, and sort of consciously know that this is supposed to happen and it does happen. In a strange way, Wind River is a heartfelt episode of CSI until it isn’t. And then it’s something entirely different, and at the same time it’s a meditation on grief. So it’s a really odd, jarring combination of genres. And so was Hell or High Water, and even Sicario to a degree. Hell or High Water moreso because it’s a story of failed fathers and sons wrapped in a buddy crime film. But I enjoy it. I enjoy kind of taking a genre and bending it on its ear. Or trying to.

You mentioned Deadpool there, is there a particular superhero or superhero movie you’d like to tackle or is that just something you enjoy as an audience member? 

SHERIDAN: I don’t know, I was never—I don’t know ‘em. But you know, Deadpool was a great movie. And it did that, it really played with genre. It was just a really, really smart, entertaining film. Likewise Chris Nolan’s Batman with Heath Ledger elevated to something completely different that I don’t think anyone expected. Who expected that? And if you go back to the first Batman that Tim Burton did, that was a real, again, a spunky—no one expected that. If I’m fortunate enough to get the opportunity to explore something, as long as I can bring something fresh to it, and feel like I can make something entertaining, I won’t say that there’s anything I won’t do. I don’t think I’m the best guy do to the romcom, but if I come up with one I will.

Get a really depressing Nick Cave and Warren Ellis score to go over it.

SHERIDAN: Exactly (laughs)

What are you working on now? Are you one of these writers that has a bunch of scripts in a drawer? Are you working on something now?

SHERIDAN: I’m working on something now for Sony, I’m adapting a really interesting French film called Disorder. There was room for exploration in there, so that’s what I’m working on now.

Do you have stuff that you’ve already written that you’d like to get made someday like Hell or High Water?

SHERIDAN: I wrote something a couple of years ago for Bradley Cooper and Warner Bros. that I would love to see find its way to the screen. I think it’s a hell of a movie.

Wind River does not currently have a release date. Click here to catch up on all of our Sundance 2017 coverage thus far.