‘Bull’ Interview with Director Annie Silverstein
Being accepted into Cannes is no small feat. Even more so if you go back to back with consecutive films. For director Annie Silverstein, that’s just what she did. She first went back in 2014 where she won the Cinéfondation award for her student thesis short, Skunk. The second time would come five years later in 2019 with debut feature, Bull, which competed in both Camera d’Or and Un Certain Regard.
The later of which translates roughly to ‘From Another Angle,’ and if you were to watch Bull, you’d come to understand, both stylistically and narratively, why the film is suited for such a categorization. But getting there was not easy. During the five year gap, Silverstein worked on making the jump all filmmakers hope for: going from narrative short to narrative feature. She attended a number of development labs, revised her work, found new inspirations, and revised again as she honed her craft and fine tuned the film itself.
Bull tells the story of an unlikely friendship that forms between troubled youth, Kris, and former bull rider turned rodeo clown, Abe. Bearing the physical scars of his younger years, Abe is relegated to the sidelines as he longs for his glory days while Kris grows up visiting her incarcerated mother and hanging around bad influences. After a night that sees Kris and her friends destructively partying in Abe’s home, she is forced to assist him in daily duties to avoid legal repercussions. But soon, Kris picks up an interest in bull riding and her punishment morphs into a constructive learning opportunity for them both, one that sees Kris changing her troubled trajectory and one that finds new purpose for Abe in his aging decline.
“My starting point was rooted in the social work I did before I went to film school,” Silverstein said. “The teenagers I was working with were from rural and underrepresented communities. Poverty was an issue, and several of them had parents who were incarcerated. So when I moved to Texas in 2010 to start the graduate film program at UT Austin, I began to write scenes that were based on my experiences from that time.”
Silverstein’s social work set the foundation for Kris’ backstory, but the inspiration for Abe’s character came before Skunk was even finished. “While location scouting for my thesis film, I met a man who came from a well known black rodeo family, and he introduced me to the history of black rodeo. I didn’t know much about, it really isn’t taught in school, and it’s often left out of cinema’s depiction of the west, so it sparked my curiosity to learn more about this part of our history.”
Combining the two experiences provided Silverstein with an intersection that provided a new angle to the Western genre. The endless western frontier is swapped with an impoverished rural Texas town. The white gun slinging cowboy is traded for an African American bull rider who’s seen better days. And the conflicts of men on the plane are given a contemporary facelift with the modern plights of America like incarceration, poverty, and the opioid crisis. The culminating effect is one that makes the viewer recontextualize the Western, one that makes them rethink who is and isn’t included in the genre and what that might look like today, decades after Hollywood effectively killed the genre.
Getting there, though, required several phases and workshops. “We received a lot of support from Sundance and the Austin Film Society to help us through the development stage. We were first accepted at the Austin Film Society’s Artist Intensive which was a three day workshop on Richard Linklater’s ranch where mentors like Jonathan Demy and Azazel Jacob gave us feedback on the script. Then we went through the Sundance Institute Writer’s Lab, Director’s Lab, and Producer’s Lab in 2016.”
Silverstein continued, “We really nailed down the script in 2017, but we continued to refine things even through shooting. I had a baby in 2016 right after the Director’s Lab, so I took time off to be a new mother, but five months later I jumped back into it, started fundraising, and by the summer of 2018, we were shooting.”
Developing Bull’s style was apart of the creative process. Like the narrative, the film’s aesthetic has a uniqueness all its own, often drawing visual parallels to the quiet and subdued fittings of a Kelly Reichardt film. Sharing reference photos and collaborating with her DP early on helped define the film’s visual language, but ultimately “listening to the page” was what worked for Silverstein.
“We wanted the visual style to reflect the scene and the tone of the story, … to be in sync with the characters. I was working with a lot of non-actors, and [I wanted] a style that wouldn’t be too constrictive to their movement. I didn’t want to put the pressure on them to hit very specific marks. I wanted them to really be able to focus on the performance.”
Bull was supposed to screen at SXSW, followed shortly there after by a theatrical run. As I’m sure you have guessed by now, those plans never came to fruition. Like many filmmakers this year, Silverstein’s journey saw an unceremonious disruption from the coronavirus, one that scuttled the long awaited payoff many filmmakers are after. In a situation like this, you can’t help but feel sympathetic towards the hand dealt to these artists, especially when you hear a story like hers. However, if there’s a point of optimism to end this story on, it’s that Silverstein has already begun working an her next project, and given her eye for cinema, it won’t be her last time showing her film to audiences. Here’s hoping for a three-peat at Cannes.
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