STACK NZ Aug #65

2 1 3

4

with NIKI CARO .

Did you enjoy working with the boys you cast as the runners? As a filmmaker, I love to work in real communities and real people. I like to light them up. There’s something special about putting people on screen who never saw themselves that way and don’t necessarily see how beautiful they are. Not just these boys, but also the community in general. All seven of the boys we cast are worthy of important and satisfying careers. They all have something special. As well as running, some of the characters are also into low-riding. Can you tell us about that culture? Low-riding was very big in the Central Valley in the mid-’80s. Bakersfield was one of the low-riding epicenters of this area and this country. I have a strong connection to it because my husband is a big part of that culture, so I know way more about low-riding than a middle-class white woman from New Zealand should! Low-riding culture is vastly different to how it’s generally portrayed on screen.

What the movie business has done to low- riding is use it as shorthand for gangster, when in fact it’s almost the complete opposite. In the world of low-riding, it’s all about family; it’s all about community and these vehicles, how beautiful they are and the work that you do on them and the way you show them off. There’s a great deal of pride in low-riding culture that’s indicative of the pride in Mexican culture generally. What happened to the real-life running team? A number of the original runners became teachers in McFarland, in the very high school [they themselves attended]. One of them, David Diaz, was actually the principal of that school for some time. The fact they’re all back working and raising their families in their town and actively supporting the cross-country teams of today speaks volumes about the magic of that community and of those people.

of attention to authenticity and specificity. So, when I cast a movie like this, I always want to go right to the truth and the truth of this movie is kids who run, who live in McFarland, and who also do field work. So, we went there. In fact, we went to a lot of similar communities in California about 18 months before we even got into the casting process to identify who these kids were, through group auditions and little improvisations. We were also casting within the acting community but what’s amazing about the seven of them is that three of them are from McFarland and had never acted before. So it was fantastic in pre-production to put the real kids through acting training, and put the acting kids through physical training. They all had a lot to learn from each other. The group is so tight and seamless that nobody can tell me who are the actors and who are the non-actors. They were intensively prepared and they worked incredibly hard. I had a huge amount of respect for that going in and a huge amount of confidence.

McFarland, USA, is out on DVD and

Blu-ray on August 19

stack.net.nz