Jockey premiered at Sundance 2021, where Clifton Collins Jr.’s turn as horse jockey Jackson took the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Best Actor. The intimate portrait of an aging athlete faced with transitions in both his personal and professional lives is filmmaker Clint Bentley’s directing debut on a film he wrote with his longtime writing partner, Greg Kwedar.
Bentley and Kwedar began making shorts and documentaries together a decade ago. Kwedar directed their first feature — also starring Collins Jr. — Transpecos , which premiered at the 2016 SXSW Film Festival and won an Audience Award.“We met through a friend of mine from school who Clint ended up marrying,” Kwedar said.
“One of the early conversations they had was you need to meet my friend Greg; you both have not only a passion for filmmaking, but in a more specific way, we both had a passion for the border conflict. And in particular, on the more humanitarian side I had been doing a lot of work in a really specific community in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico at a girls orphanage and Clint had traveled the entire length of it making a student documentary. And so our first project was writing our first film, Transpecos. It took six years to both research it and figure out how to write a script and then figure out how to finance a film and through that whole process was what really deepened our friendship and showed us our process that we carry into the films that we make now.”
The world of Jockey came from a very personal place, however: Bentley’s dad was a jockey.
“It was a spark for feeling like I knew a world that we hadn't seen in film before and just wanting to get that across — not having any idea of a story or anything like that,” Bentley said.
“And then a big part of mine and Greg's process as we write any of our scripts is the research side of things; we go and we spend a lot of time with the people in the world. So I took Greg to a track in Houston and just seeing the world fresh through his eyes was huge in terms of opening up new avenues of the script and new areas of the world that I didn't know about.”
While Jockey was filmed in only 20 days, “it was like, three years just to get to the point from when we started writing to when we started shooting. And in that time, we were working on two or three other features and a limited series … things come and go you know, as any writer knows; you develop things and it sometimes takes time,” Bentley said.
“So yeah, we're working on a few different projects at any one time, which is helpful because you're also reminded of just doing the work — just get on to the next thing and start working on the next one, because that’s why we're doing this: to make movies, not just talk about them.”
Their collaborative efforts are well-honed through all that writing — even the way they conduct an interview feels effortlessly balanced. Bentley and Kwedar know each other well and can confidently speak to their work in a way that’s warm and welcoming, never pretentious. Perhaps that’s why their work feels so refreshingly honest, as well. That, and their dedication to the worlds they create.
“It’s honestly almost taking a journalistic approach to a world,” Kwedar said.
“Whether, you know, it's an actual place or an institution or a group of people and we want to get behind the curtain; we always say that we build our stories from the dirt up. First, it’s really uncovering that place, and then who are the people who inhabit it, and what's the relationship to their setting? Are they in harmony or conflict with their setting? Who are they in all of their beauty and warts and how do they relate to each other? Then the story is oftentimes the last thing we're looking for. We’ll know far too much about any given world, but that's kind of where our credibility will come from; to feel like we have earned the right to participate in that community and tell that story. And then it's like, what is that arrow shot? …That’s sometimes the hardest to crack and it's the thing we're the least precious about. We become very precious about the setting and the characters and those don't really change that much. They just deepen the story. If we don't find the right mousetrap, we’ll happily scrap it and go back to the studs and rebuild it.”
Bentley seamlessly continues on Kwedar’s thoughts to describe their process: “We did either five or six page-one rewrites on [our first] film,” he said.
“And part of that was we were learning to write. … But Jockey, we did three page-one rewrites on it. Because hopefully we're getting better and hopefully we can lower the number of times we do that. ... Then because there's two of us and because we're working in different locations, there's a lot of outlining that goes into the process. Then at that point, once we find the story, we write it out in a 10 to 15-page prose document, where each paragraph is a scene. And once we can get it to there, even though there are some gaps and there are things that will be filled in, we basically have the story and then we can divide it up into either scenes or sections where one person has a better feeling for that section or one person has a better feeling for that scene. Once we get all those written, then we put them all together in a draft and it’s very Frankenstein, but hopefully it feels like a movie. Then it's just a process of revising, revising, revising 50 times, and then in the very end it is with Final Draft, specifically. We’ll open the collaboration tool in the final weeks of that when we're getting ready to share it either with our core group of readers we have relied on for over a decade, or if it's actually going to the producers or the studio, and that’s where war happens,” Bentley chuckled.
“Then we're debating very passionately about the minutiae of the script. And then, it flies the nest.”
Their process is part of the Bentley-Kwedar magic, and provides a solid bit of inspiration for other screenwriting partners out there.
“You need to have similar tastes. … Greg says it much more succinctly than I do,” Bentley said.
“But I think you need to have the same taste and the same kind of place you're aiming, but if you're both the same writer, then one of you is unnecessary.”
To him, the writing partnership is becoming “really clear-eyed about what your strengths are as a writer and how a collaborator could sharpen those, but also complement them with their own distinct gifts.”
“It’s a joy,” adds Kwedar, “because it can be such a lonely, lonely journey. To have someone to share [it with], it makes it much more alive. It feels like we're really making a film, you know, and that collaboration — in what is the ultimate, I think, artistic collaboration on earth. I think it's overlooked how much of the collaboration the writing could be and how alive that could be, and what you could learn from that process.”
Bentley refers to their scripts as living documents, which continue to transform.
“... They continue to evolve throughout the process of making the film as we all discover things. And Jockey was like that to the nth degree. But one of my favorite moments of that was with Molly [Parker]. She discovered so much about her character and about the world that wasn't as focused on in the original script because it was so focused on the jockey’s life. And there was one night where we were getting ready to shoot the scene where she and Jackson are around this bonfire, and she starts talking about all of her hopes and dreams and it connects to his and having a dream at middle age that you didn't think was possible. And all that came from doing last looks with Molly on her wardrobe. She's like, ‘I just feel like I need to say these things.’ Not in a like, an actor-y, ‘I need a monologue’ way. She just felt like this is a nice opportunity. And so she literally just spouted off what she was thinking into my phone and then Greg and I got together and kind of put that into a little monologue,” he said.
It’s those moments of creative collaboration that make Jockey jump off the screen and into hearts. Since its Sundance premiere, Jockey has played more than 30 festivals worldwide, and debuted to a vast audience on Dec. 29, 2021.