Co-Writer of REZ BALL Talks Writing Sports Drama And Embracing Tropes
October 10, 2024
It can be incredibly difficult to venture into an established genre like the sports drama.
It’s a tried-and-true narrative with some equally tested—and beloved—tropes. Sometimes the team is a ragtag group of misfits, the underdogs no one believes in. Sometimes the coach has taken on this post after failing in the big leagues. Often, the most dramatic moment comes down to the last play in the big game.
Writer/director Sydney Freeland (Diné) knows all these tropes. And instead of fighting against them during the writing process, she embraced them, flipped them, gave them a unique spin, and made them work for the story.
Rez Ball tells the story of a high school basketball team in the Navajo Nation whose players dream of making the state championships. When they lose their star player, they must work together to overcome grief and self-doubt, and hopefully take their game all the way. Co-written with Sterlin Harjo (Seminole and Muscogee Nations), a collaborator from Freeland’s Reservation Dogs days, the film is a fresh take on the basketball drama with a strong emotional core and unique characters.
Freeland spoke to us about her background, the challenges of the sports genre, how she builds characters, and more.
Rez Ball is on Netflix now.
Final Draft: I would love to hear about your background and how you got into film.
Sydney Freeland: I grew up in New Mexico on the Navajo reservation. The concept of filmmaking didn’t really exist for me growing up, but I was surrounded by storytellers. I grew up on an Indian reservation, so a lot of my family members did what I would call traditional or classical mediums of art: painting, weaving, pottery, silversmithing, things like that.
When I went to school to study, I went to study painting and drawing. Along the way, you’re exposed to other mediums. For me, that was computer art, computer animation, photography, creative writing. Creative writing was this mind-blowing concept of like, “Wait, I can tell a story? I can make up a story and tell it myself?” It was like, yeah, of course.
All that came together in my final semester of undergraduate when I took a class called Film or Video and fell in love with the process of making a film, because it combined all those things I just mentioned into one.
I threw myself into film school. I was very fortunate. Very early on, I had an amazing screenwriting professor, this woman named Donna Laemmlen at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She was really instrumental in giving me the basics. I was coming from a place of complete ignorance, if we’re talking about screenwriting and filmmaking in general. But she helped to guide me, in addition to being an excellent teacher. Like all great teachers do, they help you to help yourself.
Final Draft: What was your first step as you started tackling this project as a writer?
Freeland: This is the second feature that I’ve written, but what was different about this one is that I had a co-writer in Sterlin Harjo.
We were both approached by this production company, Wise Entertainment, in 2019. They had purchased the rights to a series of New York Times articles by this reporter, Michael Powell. Michael embedded himself in the Navajo Nation and was documenting the basketball on the reservation. The articles were obviously well-written, and as a piece of journalism, are great. But it’s a very outside-in perspective. So when Sterlin and I came on board, if the newspaper articles were the conversation starter for us, it was like, “Okay, there’s something here. If we were going to tell a rez ball story, how would we do it?”
And that was really this desire to tell it from the inside out. That was the jumping-off point. I think a couple of things became apparent early on. We found these mutual experiences, myself growing up in New Mexico, Sterlin growing up in Oklahoma. There were these almost landmarks and milestones from our own experiences. So for us, it was trying to flesh those out and build a story around them.
Final Draft: Was there an element that was difficult for you to break?
Freeland: It’s always hard with a blank page.
One of the things that we talked about early on was this idea of, if we’re talking about the sports movie genre, there are certain tropes of that genre. And instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, I think one of the things that we wanted to do was lean into that and say, “Okay, we’re not going to reinvent the wheel, but perhaps the tropes of the genre can actually be our friend, because it’s not going to be the ‘what’ that’s going to be different. It’s going to be the ‘how.’”
What I mean by that is if we’re telling a story about kids on the Navajo reservation, if they have to have a team-building exercise, it’s going to be wholly unique to something that might happen anywhere else. In this case, it’s the coach taking them to sheep camp.
Final Draft: Do you have a method for fleshing out characters?
Freeland: Certainly it’s an amalgamation of several different elements. There’s a character in the film, Bryson Badonie [Devin Sampson-Craig, The Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe]. He’s the shit-talker on the team. He’s the wild card. I feel like every team has that player. For myself, I personally knew probably five or six Brysons. It was an amalgamation of picking and choosing different aspects of those people that I knew to flesh out the character.
Somebody like the coach, Heather Hobbs [Jessica Matten, Red River Cree Métis], I think one of the big things for us was we had a lot of conversations early on about this idea of the white savior. Whether it’s Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds coming to the inner city, or even to a certain extent, Gene Hackman in Hoosiers, the big-city coach comes and is going to teach these country rubes how to play basketball the right way.
One thing we were very adamant about is that we wanted to have a coach who was from the community, who would understand what these kids were going through. In this case, she was actually from the high school.
A lot of that is based on, again, my personal experiences and seeing the people that I used to play with in high school now coming back and coaching. One of the great things about that decision of having a coach who’s from the community is that it had all these positive consequences down the line.
For example, when the team does face adversity, she’s not going to take them back to the big city and take them to an art gallery and teach them how to assess a fine art painting or take them to a fine dining establishment and teach them how to use a salad fork as a proxy for team-building. No, she’s going to take them to the place that she knew growing up, which was sheep camp.
And then that’s going to plant the seed with our main character to then ask the question, “Well, what if we called these plays in Navajo?” And so the more you start pulling on those different story threads, the more that this inside-out method was starting to fall into place.
Final Draft: It sounds like two things that were very important to you in the storytelling were being aware of those tropes and playing on them, and then writing from your experience.
Freeland: Yeah. I remember one specific example, it was my senior year, and we were driving to the district tournament, and our bus got a flat tire on the way as we were driving to the tournament. The bus pulls over on the side of the road. Everybody’s just on the bus. And then our assistant coach gets up; he’s very sincere, very somber, very serious. “Everybody off the bus, off the bus, off the bus. Everyone circle up outside.”
So we go out and we all circle up outside while the driver’s repairing the flat. Our assistant coach, very serious: “The opposing team, they put a hex on us, and it caused our tire to go flat. So everyone, bless yourself, protect yourself. We need protection going into the first round of the district championships.”
That was a specific example that I had. If we’re using that as inspiration, trying to infuse the spirit of that. That’s where you get something like the assistant coach, Benny Begay [Ernest Tsosie III, Diné]. He’s the spiritual center of the team, but he’s also a little superstitious, and he’s got some comedy relief.
Final Draft: You mentioned that the blank page can be hard to look at sometimes. What do you do to get warmed up?
Freeland: Sterlin and I came on board in 2019, and then I spent 2020 writing the script. It was right during COVID. It was an unusual experience.
When we first started off, we had a week, maybe, where we got to be in the same room together. I think that first week was one of the most fruitful periods of the writing process, because we were able to hash out the bones and the structure of things. In rewrites, a lot of stuff changed. But from there, we went remote, and we’d pass stuff back and forth.
Sterlin was also the co-creator and showrunner of a little show called Reservation Dogs. That got picked up in early 2020. And then we had a writers’ room for that. During COVID, I think I was one of the few people that had a ton of work during that period.
I specifically remember during that spring and summer and even fall during COVID, I was writing on Rez Ball for a couple hours in the morning, and then I had a different pilot that I had sold with a co-writer that I was working on. And then, I would come in the afternoon for a five-hour writing room on Reservation Dogs. So it was a very, very intense process.
But I think the writing process is—in relationship to directing, in relationship to editing—it’s all relative. I find that a four-hour day of writing is about equivalent to a 12-hour day on a film set. My ideal schedule is I’ll do two hours in the morning, 9 to 11, 10 to 12, take a lunch break—an hour, hour and a half—and then do another two hours in the afternoon. And then I’m tapped out after four hours.
It is just having that consistency and getting into a rhythm and getting into a flow. Some days, you sit on a blank page for an hour and 59 minutes, and then you write a line of dialogue, and then you call it a day. And other days, you can sit there and spit out 18 pages. But you can’t predict it. It all depends. That’s the process, right? For myself, it’s usually two hours of writing in the morning, two hours of writing in the afternoon, then that usually taps me out.
Final Draft: It’s very intensive and interior work. It sounds like that period, the pandemic, it was maybe through sheer force of will that you were churning it out.
Freeland: Yeah. It was also a welcome distraction because nobody knew what was going on. So it was, oddly, the one thing you could control. Back then, there was no vaccine, people were dying left and right. It was this welcome distraction.
But at the same time, it is very solitary work. I was able to rent out an office space close to the house where my partner and I lived in Santa Monica, and I was able to commute two blocks. That became a welcome routine despite all the other stuff going on.
Final Draft: What advice do you have for aspiring screenwriters?
Freeland: I think the only way to write is to write. You can read all the books, and you can listen to all the lectures, and you can watch all the Masterclasses and everything, but there’s no substitute to actually doing the thing. Again, that was one of the things that my professor shared with me. She said, “Just write, get something on the page.”
I think that’s always been the hardest part. It’s always that first step, getting that first line of action, that line of dialogue on the page. And if you can do that, you’re probably 99% of the way there.
