For two decades Daniel Minahan has quietly shaped the modern television landscape, lending a sharp eye and fearless storytelling to HBO series such as Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Big Love, True Blood, and Game of Thrones, as well as FX’s American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace—for which he won an Emmy—and the Netflix miniseries Halston. Minahan made his feature directorial debut with Series 7: The Contenders, which screened in competition at the Sundance Film Festival, and went on to direct Deadwood: The Movie for HBO Films.
His work is distinguished by a recurring interest in characters who live on the margins—people whose desires, identities, and ambitions push against the boundaries of convention. Minahan’s latest brings him back to the big screen and follows suit as a quietly radical love story set against the sun-bleached edges of 1950s Americana, where, for some, desire and freedom are akin to a high-stakes card game.
Adapted from Shannon Pufahl’s debut novel, On Swift Horses premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival and arrives in theaters on April 25th from Sony Pictures Classics. Set in the Eisenhower era, the story follows newlyweds Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Lee (Will Poulter) as they attempt to build a life in California—only to find their domestic dreams complicated by the arrival of Lee’s younger brother Julius (Jacob Elordi).
Boxoffice Pro sat down with director/producer Daniel Minahan in advance of the Sony Pictures Classics’ April 25th release to discuss the romantic geometry of On Swift Horses and how the story reinterprets the American dream through a queer lens.
The narrative of the American West is often dominated by straight white males. This story offers all of the romanticism, struggle, and hope of the American West, but through other perspectives.
I like to describe this film as a reimagining of the American Dream. We’re in muddy housing developments, backroom card games, casinos and racetracks, cruising parks and gay bars. These are all young, impulsive people that have this desire to be a part of something and to make a home. I think it’s the overarching desire of everyone.
This feels like a movie that’s built for the big screen, not only because it’s gorgeous to look at, but because you really allow the characters and the performances space to breathe. Given that the book is a very internal journey, your approach puts the character’s internal emotional life front and center.
That was really important to me. When we set out to make this, one of my directives to everyone was that we don’t want to make a film that’s pretending to be a film from the fifties that’s set in the 1950s. I didn’t want to make something that was too much of a pastiche or that was nostalgic. There are some very big scope images, but we tried to do them in unexpected ways. With all the choices that we made, that was the way we approached everything.
In terms of the visual look and feel, there’s the sumptuous fixed frame, which is contrasted with the electricity and freedom of handheld in the intimate moments between characters. How did the language of the visuals help inform story and character?
Instead of watching movies for this, the cinematographer [Luc Montpellier] and I looked at a lot of documentary photography and paintings from the period. We looked at photographers like Bruce Davidson, who photographed young people and gangs in the fifties and sixties. Gordon Parks, a journalistic photographer and filmmaker who did a lot of beautiful color work, and Vivian Maier.
Then we just committed ourselves to following the actors and the emotion, letting that drive how we were going to set the shots. When the characters are their happiest or their most free, it’s all handheld in order to feel this kind of kinetic excitement. It’s a great observation. That was one of the sorts of tropes we set for ourselves.
Returning to features gives you an opportunity to establish a tone on set that is perhaps more challenging in the pre-existing machinery of a television series. What was that opportunity like for you? What were some of the benefits of that and of the rehearsal time you created for the cast?
Yeah, the rehearsals were important to me. We had about four days of rehearsals. We did intimacy rehearsals with the actors, choreographing the sex scenes and talking about the possible things that we wanted to do. We had a dance choreographer come in, and everybody got to dance together and kind of make fools of themselves, and that bonded them. That was important too, because people danced differently [in the 50s] than we do.
We did a read-through of the whole script, which I always think is important. You get a sense of the whole piece and [ensure that] everybody’s telling the same story. Then we just handpicked the scenes that we knew were going to be the most difficult and ran them a couple of times. I didn’t want to over-rehearse them, but we got them up on their feet. That was great; they got to get a sense of each other.
The moment that Muriel and Julius meet has a mythic, almost Romeo & Juliet quality about it. They’re both in a level of undress that reflects the stripped-down understanding they seem to have of one another.
That was a lift directly from Shannon Pufahl’s novel. That’s how they meet in the novel; she tosses a cigarette down to him. It was just so great. When I started to think about it, there’s actually the introduction of William Holden’s character in Picnic. He meets Kim Novak in the same way. She’s in the upstairs of this white house brushing her hair out first thing in the morning, and he comes in and he’s got his shirt off.
I think Shannon allowed all of the film and literature from the period to wash over her. She wasn’t quoting it, but you feel the influence of a lot of different things. So that was really fun. It’s such a great introduction of a character. He enters, hitchhiking down the road in this mysterious way. Who takes their shirt off and sunbathes in the winter?
Have you had any experiences going to the movies that shaped you later as an artist?
You can be like my therapist. The first thing that comes to mind was when I was in high school. I snuck into New York and met this boy from Yale, and we went to the Waverly Theater in Greenwich Village [now the IFC Center] and saw Querelle, the [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder film, and it absolutely blew my mind that there could be a film that was made about that subject. A film that was about sexuality and that kind of life. It really struck me. Fassbinder’s Querelle was a very important experience for me.
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