Director and writer Julian Higgins had already made a short film adaptation of James Lee Burke’s story Winter Light. But chance encounters with writer Shaye Ogbonna, both during and after their time at the American Film Institute, made him think it needed a revisit with an expanded focus. Their writing process was unconventional, as is the end product of their film.

God’s Country is a modern Western thriller starring Thandiwe Newton as a Black college professor living a quiet life in a rural area. When she confronts a pair of trespassing hunters, she finds herself an unwilling participant in an escalating feud that has the potential for brutal consequences for all involved.

The film premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and was just released in theatres by IFC Films. I spoke with Higgins and Ogbonna about this newer adaptation and some of the themes they wanted to explore.

How did you connect with each other and what was it that made you want to collaborate on this project?

Julian: The fact of the matter is that we didn’t know each other very well when we decided to work on this project together… but we had a series of important moments of connection over about six years and it just made a lot of sense.

We met while we were both students at AFI (American Film Institute) in L.A. We weren’t in the same year, but conversation number one was outside the screening room. I think I had screened a cut of my thesis film as a second-year for the first-year students, of which Shaye was one. We had a conversation outside that screening and just talked shop for a few minutes… then we met at a birthday party a couple of years later after we both graduated.

Julian Higgins. Photo by Chris Labadie

Shaye had done another film called Lowlife that he wrote and also acted in with a group of other AFI collaborators, and I was invited by the director to attend a screening. It was right after the 2016 election, and in the after party for that event, Shaye and I had the conversation that led to working together on this project. It felt really important to us at that time to respond to what was happening in the world in our work.

Shaye: I was a big fan of Julian’s work… I saw his thesis film at AFI and immediately thought “I hope one day I get to work with this super talented guy.”I was a bit of a fanboy! Thinking “Man, I should talk to him, but I’m not gonna do it.” But long story short, we ended up meeting at the cast and crew screening for Lowlife and we started talking. It was like it was a culmination of a 5-year process of being a fan of this guy and wanting to meet him. We ended up having this electric conversation about what the thesis was and how to make our art into activism. Because I think we’re both very politically active guys, but we’re also artists, creatives, and we come from a legacy of using our work as our activism in our advocacy. So that’s how we connected and we both had similar sensibilities… we both loved westerns!

Julian: This is the interesting thing about how collaborations materialize… we had that very important conversation after the Lowlife screening, and then a month later, I had this idea about how to take this short story that I had adapted once before and reimagine it in a completely new direction, changing the main character and leaning into some of the themes that I hadn’t explored in the short film version. And because of that conversation, Shaye was in my mind immediately. We had talked a lot about what was motivating us to tell stories in general, the feelings we were having at the time, and there was a lot of emotional overlap. It just made sense to me… so having had maybe an hour and a half of conversation with Shaye in my entire life, I sent him an e-mail and asked if he would like to have lunch with me and watch a short film. That was how it started.

Tell me about Winter Light, James Lee Burke’s short story that inspired this film. What was it that appealed to you and what did you want to change?

Julian: That was the short story I turned into a short film back in 2014, and it was a very direct adaptation. In the short story, the main character is an old retired white man and he’s confronting two younger white men that are trespassing on his property. The reason I was interested in it was completely different. I was thinking about masculinity and confrontations between generations of men specifically.

To be totally honest, I wasn’t really thinking about whiteness when I made that story. I was thinking about my relationship with my father and the way men of different generations relate to each other. And things like college life and so on. So it was different.

Because it was just enough material for a short film, I thought that was really the end of it. But then 2016 brought a sense of collapsing norms and values and belief systems. And the story came back to me because it’s a very simple framework for conflict, you know? Just a very simple story about an intruder on the property that brings up these questions of values… and it occurred to me that if that character stops being a white man and becomes a 40-something black woman, for example, then suddenly the story changes; it becomes much bigger and can access more subjects. So that was the initial thought.

The original thought was that it would be the race only that changed, and that’s when Shaye and I started talking… then in our process the idea came up that it could be a woman, and that would allow us maximum access to the topics we wanted to explore. It was really our desire to tell an intersectional story about all of these different issues that led us to making that character change.

We had different reasons for making the movie, and one of the things that Shaye and I talked about was our relationship to genre. I don’t necessarily think about genre that much, but Shaye, you should talk a little bit about what you want to do as a drama writer because I think that is related.

Shaye: I’ve always been interested in genre. I grew up watching mainstream studio and Hollywood films, and those were the films that I was raised on in terms of filmmaking. But I think I also have a sophisticated approach to storytelling. So for me, I’ve always been interested in general but elevated genre, and not only that, but also perspective.

Shaye Ogbonna

Action, crime, western films… they’re always told through a very specific lens. When I watched these films, I was always looking for myself and looking for people that I knew and grew up around. They were always told from a very white male perspective…and one of the reasons I became a writer was to be able to introduce other perspectives in mainstream storytelling. God’s Country is a great example of that.

There are a lot of quiet moments in the film. How important is visual storytelling and that lack of dialogue, to this story in particular?

Shaye: Julian is a director, that’s his trade and that’s what he is first. He’s also a brilliant writer, but he’ll tell you that he’s a director first. I think for directors, that comes naturally, but for me as a writer… I think I’m pretty good at writing things down, but I’m actually very interested in the unspoken. That’s probably why I like Westerns so much. I’m very interested in subtext and quiet. Westerns specifically are so much about man’s – and in this case, woman’s – relationship with nature and the landscape. In order to really achieve that, you have to strip it down. Even when you’re dealing with interactions between other human beings, a lot of time you have to strip that dialogue away and get down to what the heart of the scene is. What are people really saying? Because a lot of times when people speak, they’re just talking to each other. You’re trying to see what they’re saying and what’s going on behind or underneath the words. So I’ve always been intrigued by the subtext and by the quiet.

I think a lot of times we are depicted as though we love dialogue… we love talky films. As a writer, I’m actually interested in the opposite.

Julian: There are a bunch of dividing lines for me in terms of what sorts of work I respond to, even as a viewer. I like when a movie trusts me, as the audience member, to participate in the story and participate in filling in the connections between things that are happening. I really don’t like feeling like a movie is trying to spoon feed me or talk to me like I can’t follow unless it’s explained as we go. And when you see a movie that puts aside dialogue for extended periods of time, I find that really involving… because it’s making me figure out what’s going on with this person and it is a visual medium. I like to have people doing things and to watch things unfolding rather than have them sitting and talking.

When we do have our dialogue scenes, and there are only really a few in the movie…then it’s like, “let’s just really lean into it and allow it to be a scene that’s about that communication.” What I have learned as a director over the years is when you have that kind of relationship between talking and doing, then when you shoot the dialogue scene, you can just trust the actors, have the camera in the right place and let it be. You don’t have to constantly be gussying it up with all this camera work either.

I remember one thing we talked about a lot was the idea of a simple story with complex characters. That was something Shaye was saying throughout; our focus is on character and character psychology within a very simple framework. Genre helps with that, and also watching people do things. Throughout the movie, our character is constantly going somewhere. She’s chasing something, she’s on her way to something, she’s figuring something out. There’s something she’s solving. We’re watching her do things, and that’s more fun to write and more fun to shoot, to be honest.

Speaking of not spoon feeding your audience, what violence there is in the film is quite understated and left to the viewer’s imagination. Do you find that a more powerful method?

Julian: It’s that same thing of trusting the audience; it’s trusting the power of the audience’s imagination. There’s something nice about, say, a radio experience where because you’re only hearing people talk about it, you are imagining everything. There’s this quote: “The cinema achieves its greatest power when it refuses to show what it’s trying to evoke.” I really love that because it’s like the movie is happening in your brain as the viewer, and we’re giving you the tip of the iceberg that creates that thought.

Shaye: We’re so desensitized to violence these days, especially in cinema and TV… it’s just going there and showing everything. I’ve always been interested in the effect, the cost, the ramifications, the fallout… all of that stuff. It’s always been about not what I see, but what I feel or what I hear. For me, that’s always more compelling and more effective than just actually seeing.

Julian: It’s about where we want the audience’s attention to be and that’s what movies can do that other mediums can’t do as well. We get to say, “OK, audience, you’re going to look at this and you’re not going to look at this” – and that has meaning. That has political meaning, and it also has story meaning. We had a whole bunch of things we talked about in terms of how we wanted to approach the movie that we wanted to do – but we also knew what we did not want to do.

What role does religion play in the story?

Julian: It’s very interesting that you’re the first person asking about this. I think we should answer from our own perspectives because this was obviously something that we talked about clearly as major thematic material in the movie.

The movie is about cycles that perpetuate because we aren’t being honest with ourselves, you know? And so it’s very important to access that idea through all of these structures we’re looking at and belief systems… obviously, a major way that people process their lives and understand what they should and should not do is through religion – at least in theory. Shaye brought a lot to the table here. I was not raised religious at all so I didn’t have the sort of personal experience of that… but I certainly have been affected – as we all are – by religion and religious institutions and religious thought. And thinking about the different ways that people and belief systems change and are challenged. It felt really important to make that a part of the movie, especially since no one wants to talk about religion, much less challenge it. In art specifically… I don’t think our movie overtly challenges it, but it shows people who are struggling with questions of faith. And struggling with their existing belief systems or the effects of things that they believed at one time.

Shaye: Religion, specifically evangelicalism, is a huge part of America… it’s very much ingrained in our fabric and it’s been used as a tool to bring people together. It’s been used as a tool to colonize… genocide… whatever you want to call it. And it is something that’s such the fabric of our nation; people, God, country.

Obviously it’s the title of our film, but it’s also an ideal that’s kind of been espoused about our country specifically. I’m always looking for things that are universal, that people can identify with, no matter what walk of life you come from. How you identify racially, culturally…the one thing that is like a common denominator, no matter what faith you are, is a certain level of religion. And so even though these characters come from these different worlds, one thing that unites them is the fact that they have this connection to religion through their parents.

Sandra Guidry (Thandiwe Newton) Photo courtesy of GC Film

I’m always looking for that in my work, because I like to explore dynamics between different people and different walks of life and cultures. Religion and the church, specifically within this story, is something that I was interested in exploring. This is also a modern western… you want to have this touchstone, that white church, that steeple in the middle of this vast emptiness. It’s very much an iconic image for me.

I remember we were in Montana doing a research trip… and we went up to this beautiful white church. And I could just see it…

Julian: We just thought we have to have it if we’re going to make a Western. And it’s about a woman who feels alienated in this environment and there’s a place that is a hub of community. We had to bring her there somehow.

I also think it’s part of the tragic aspect of it for me… I have the outsider’s view of the sense of community that it gives. Yes, there is a community, but it’s also exclusive in a way. Throughout all of our work on the project we were trying to render the complexity of things. We’re not saying religion is good and we’re not saying religion is bad… we’re showing people experiencing their lives.

A lot of our ideas were based on Shaye’s experience. Mine was more the college side of it – both of my parents were college professors, and now I teach at colleges as well. That was what I brought to the table.

But we all have some kind of relationship to religious culture and this is what we were trying to capture. It was so important to us to place the audience with this character in a way that no matter who you are, you can relate to her on a human level. 

Is there something you learned through this project and/or collaboration that you could pass on to another writer?

Shaye: The funny thing was, I hadn’t written a feature in a while before we started this project… and it made me fall in love with the process again. Sometimes screenwriting can be very rigid and that can affect creativity. I think for me and Julian, from the jump, we would just throw it all out the window and say “let’s just tell the story”. We didn’t really use slug lines and just got right in the scenes. We just wrote.

Julian: This is a 74 page script…

Shaye: I was freaking out about how short the script was. The way I was raised and taught, I thought we were huge rebels and I was scared! I thought it had to be at least 80 pages. And Julian would say “No, no no…let’s not lock ourselves into that. Just shoot it out – it’s going to be a 100-minute movie at least”. So I trusted him and had to let go. It really opened me up and I needed that process. Because now I was really reinvigorated and it almost like a rebirth for me as a feature writer. I’m so glad that we that we went through this process and we approached it the way we did. Now I approach everything like that – let’s just go to work.

Julian: I definitely feel the same. I think we were both quite frustrated with the film school model of how you get a movie made… right down to how you format a script. We just wanted to get back to the basics of “how do we think this story should go?” You know, like what do we think of it? Not trying to write it for the marketplace or try to write it to sell or anything like that. We just wanted to make something that we felt captured the things that we wanted to talk about.

No one has a higher standard for your work than you do. So we worked on it for a year and a half before we ever tried to move it forward. We just wanted to make something that we felt we could really stand behind and represented us well – that was our one goal. In the back of my mind I thought “I hope we get to make this” but we were trying not to compromise at all. I hear that all the time – “you always have to compromise”. But we didn’t want to do that. So it ended up being 74 pages and not very much description at all. And as Shaye said, we didn’t really use any classic slug lines or anything like that.

And what I learned as a director? Writing a script to try to sell it or get someone else to make it and writing it for yourself are very different. This was a script that was written to make. We were going to make it by hook or by crook, and we were just going to figure it out. So what I learned as a director was that I need to not try to think like a writer. I can be a director when I write, and I can write a scene thinking the way I think about staging or shooting a scene. Not that I would write the camera moves in, but just that I would think about it in that same way: Where are people going to be in space and how is that going to tell the story? Where do people move? What’s the visual storytelling of the scene? Not what idea do we need to convey in the scene or what information passes from one character to another.

That was a big thing for me, to just kind of start thinking like a director when I was writing. And that happened because of working with Shaye. There was no ego in the process, I think, for either of us. It was a very functional, grown up collaboration where we just were trying to figure out what made sense for the story. That allowed us to get places and have ideas without any shame or ego involved, and it took the story in places neither of us really expected.