56 / 62
with
NIKI CARO
.
2
1
3 4
Based on true a story,
McFarland, USA
is set in
1987 in the struggling eponymous Californian
town and is a classic sporting underdog story
of how a dedicated coach (Kevin Costner)
sets about building a champion cross country
team at a predominantly Latino high school.
The film marks the welcome return of Kiwi
director Niki Caro, and below she talks about
working with Costner, low-rider culture
and the similarities between this and her
breakthrough New Zealand hit
Whale Rider
.
Tell us a little about the narrative arc of
the film.
The story is about a man named Coach
JimWhite [Kevin Costner], a football
coach who loses a number of jobs and
finds himself in McFarland, California,
the very last place he wants to be. He
realizes very quickly that the kids in the
school are really bad at football. They’re
small, to begin with, and football is just
not their strength. But he recognizes that
they’re also very, very fast. So he starts a
cross country team. The high school had
never had a cross country team before he
arrived, and, coincidentally, this was the
first year that California had the first state
cross country championship. The story
follows Jim and this unlikely running team
to the state championships and beyond.
What first drew you to the project?
For a lot of reasons,
McFarland, USA
is a very appropriate story for me to tell.
It had been a long time since I’d made
Whale Rider
, but in all that time, 13 years,
I’ve been looking for a comparable project
and some story that I could make in a
similar way, and
McFarland, USA
was it.
What was it about the story or the
script that spoke to you?
The story spoke to me
because it was real. What
moved me most was the resilience of
these kids, and their emotional, physical
and spiritual endurance, which makes
them so perfect for cross country running.
The town of McFarland is unremarkable in
every way except for what these kids and
this coach have done in terms of cross
country running. What makes them so
extraordinary is to have come from that
place and to have achieved what they
achieved. They have put McFarland on
the map.
Tell us a little bit about the town itself.
McFarland’s a town in the Central
Valley in California and is largely populated
by Mexican immigrants. These are
generations of field workers and their
focus is on family, community and hard
work. It has about 8,000 people in it. It
doesn’t have a stoplight to my knowledge.
It has a McDonald’s, but that would be
the extent of the entertainment and the
nightlife. It’s a very, very hot place. This
is important because it’s a place that’s
thoroughly agricultural; everybody who
lives there works in the fields in some
capacity, and fieldwork is about as difficult
as it gets. You’re working outside in
extraordinary temperatures doing really
physical, manual work: picking fruit,
oranges, grapes and the like. These kids
are crazy remarkable in that they work,
Carlos Pratts
and Director
Niki Caro
on set of
McFarland,
USA
stack.net.nz