The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of On Swift Horses.

Can you talk about coming across this book and deciding to make it into a film?
Daniel Minahan: My producer Peter Spears and I were looking for material to make a feature together and I knew that I wanted to make a love story. We were passing books back and forth and Shannon Pufahl’s novel came to both of us at the same time, coincidentally. I started reading it and I was about halfway through when I realized that I felt really excited by this story. I called Peter and he said, Oh I’m reading it too. By the time we finished it, we knew we wanted to approach Shannon to obtain the rights. That was during lockdown. Then we reached out to Bryce about adapting the novel. We had worked together before and he came on board.

Bryce Kass: It was definitely during summer lockdown that I read the book. I was immediately struck because I had never seen characters like this before. Right away I knew there was so much to play with. The book itself is actually very different than what we see on screen, but it’s incredible—it’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. Shannon is a special, special writer. But the book has alternate timelines and flashbacks, and a lot of it was interior. For me, that was helpful because I felt like I knew these characters inside and out, including their family histories. Other sort of inflection points, from the point that they were born to growing up in their adolescence to where we meet them in the movie were so well described. I think that probably also helped the actors when they read the book, because the characters are so well drawn already. In some ways it was just about dramatizing and externalizing this stuff to make it cinematic.

DM: Yes, it was giving them a voice and making them active. Right away when we started talking, Bryce knew exactly what we needed to do to compress this very sprawling epic novel. The book was beautiful because I felt like there was something familiar about it. I felt the influence of great queer writers—there was a bit of Gore Vidal and there was a bit of James Baldwin and Patricia Highsmith, and so Shannon was kind of dipping into all of that. Not to mention all the different film genres that I think it hints at, like film noir and melodrama and the gambling. As a director, that looked delicious and challenging. We all felt compelled to adapt this.  

I think of it as a different kind of Americana

What was the research process like? I loved the part with the bulletin board at the end and I’m wondering where that idea came from.
BK: The board was in the book and when I wrote the script, I was living in Chicago. Chicago is the home to the Gerber Hart Archives, which is an incredible resource. It goes back to the turn of the century, pretty much. You have all kinds of actual saved postcards, letters, photos from similar kind of dead letter boards. Going to see that in person and researching queer life in the fifties and sixties was a great resource. A lot within the Gerber Hart Archives is about Chicago, but it also goes further afield. There was some stuff about Vegas and Kansas, but with San Diego, I had to look further. I looked at a lot of old newspapers from all those locations. The hardest piece to research in terms of queer life in that moment was Tijuana. It was a bit of a black box. I listen to a lot of music when I write, so I was just trying to find queer music. And that led to these gay cowboy bars, they have a lot in LA.

DM: Ranchero bars.

BK: Ranchero bars. They’re amazing. There was a whole history that I traced back through that music and those kinds of spaces. Back in the fifties and sixties, they were usually in port cities because when people got out of the military, they would settle in and around those areas to get jobs.

DM: Shannon shared some of her research with us as well. We got a sense of what San Diego looked like in that time period. And our remarkable production designer, Erin Magill, did a deep dive. There were so many queer bars at that time. And many of them were characterized by bird names. If you saw a bird name or a bird on the sign, like The Toucan, you’d know. There were all different ones. This one was named in the novel. It’s not a real place and it’s meant to be an SRO where you meet somebody in the lobby and you go up to a room or people live there and leave their doors open and would hook up. That was interesting—I think of it as a different kind of Americana. We have the housing development, but then we also have the underbelly. We have the rooming houses and the cruising parks and the gay bars and the backroom card games and the walkways above the casinos. It was a side door into this type of American experience.

You talked a little about all the genres and tones that the book encompassed. The tone felt very consistent, but I was also on my toes throughout. How did you approach it?
BK: For me, I always begin from a place of character and really getting into those character’s heads and getting their voices to a place I can believe. In Shannon’s book, there is already a sense of a world that’s very kind of noir infused. One of the things that we really wanted to try and make sure we got right was that even though it was noir, there was a reality to these moments. I think genuine intimacy is very uncertain. It’s shaky and strange. You never really know what’s going to come next. Hopefully it did keep you on your toes, because these characters are in their early twenties. They’re impulsive. They’re just doing what comes next. We wanted to have a movie that followed the shape and the form of what it was like to be young in that time. And there is a real sense of improvisation to what’s going on next, like, where are we going? What’s happening next? The audience is going on this adventure that’s shaped by the impulses and the desires and the fears of these people in this place.

DM: We talked a lot about this. Bryce was with me on set most of the time, so it was like having a second brain with me. One of the things that we really strove to do is to make the slang from the period—which does sound a lot like noir dialogue, like Sam Fuller, especially with the people at the track and the casinos—was to make that accessible and not to hit it too hard. It was a delicate balance. That was exciting and it was a good challenge. And thankfully we had actors who were really seasoned and very talented. Then the other thing that I think about with this film, especially when I see it now, is like, wow, what a bold idea to make a film about this subject without irony; it’s very big-hearted and quite earnest. I think that’s part of its charm and we’ll see if people enjoy that. That was important to me, not to undercut the experience of these characters with something to stylize.