Wrangler

Filmmaker: Scott Pommier

Heidi: Did you go into this with the hope Wrangler may be interested?
Scott: I knew it was a long shot, but yeah, that was the hope, irrational as it seemed at the time.

What was your connection with the brand prior to this?
It’s always been high on the list of brands I wanted to work with. I didn’t have any relationship with Wrangler before this project. A friend of mine was able to put me in touch with someone in their marketing department. That was key. I sent them a treatment and based on that they sent out some clothing.

Did you have a stylist?
I’m not sure if it’s more accurate to say that I was the stylist, or that there was no stylist. Wrangler sent clothes for me to shoot and we mixed in some of the talent’s wardrobe. In the end the styling was pretty minimal, but yeah, I was the one tumble-drying the creases out of the shirts the night before the shoot.

How much spec shooting are you doing?
Over the last few years I’ve prioritized doing little personal documentary projects over specs, but it was time to shoot something for my reel that had the form of an ad.

Where/how did this idea come about?
My favorite films are not only beautiful, but emotional. Those weren’t the kinds of scripts that were being sent to me and I knew if I was waiting for one to show up it might take forever. I tried to think of what I had access to. A few years back I shot with some trick riders for a fashion shoot so I called up Jennifer Nicholson once again. She runs the operations at Riata Ranch and trains and performs with a with a world class team of trick riders and ropers. She was such a great collaborator the last time around and I asked her if she would let me come back for another project. I told her this time instead of pushing the styling I would want to really show things as they are. I gave her a semi-coherent ramble of a pitch and she said “I’m not totally sure that I can picture everything you’re saying, but sometimes that’s what makes for the most interesting creative partnerships.” I mean…you can’t ask for better than that.

We talked a few times and I started to develop a story based on the ages and the abilities and personalities of the girls she was working with. We wanted to show what happens behind the scenes, some of what goes into the polished performance that an audience sees.

How long was the shooting process
It was pretty extended as we had to break the job into two shoots. Early on I had the idea that part of the story would happen at the Riata Ranch in Three Rivers California and part of it would happen at a live rodeo. The timing was lucky in that the Salinas Rodeo was coming up, and it’s one of the biggest rodeos in the U.S. and it’s only a few hours from Three Rivers. The plan was to drive down (from Portland) to shoot at the rodeo, and then follow the team back to Three Rivers to finish off and then home. But the California wildfires made that impossible. The fires came so close to the ranch that the animals had to be evacuated at one point. We had to wait until the visibility (and breathability) improved and the roads opened back up.  The level of smoke was a nonstarter, even if the roads were open…which they weren’t.  It was probably a month between the first and the last shoot day.

It was was eight and a half days of shooting, which sounds needlessly long, but the first four at the rodeo were really just to capture a few shots. Those first four days only account for about 8 seconds of the footage, which is about what I had anticipated. In a lot of cases time is a pretty good substitute for money. We had less control over the light, but more room to use the schedule to get us the light we were after.

In the end, we didn’t have the access we would have hoped for at the rodeo, and Ava the young trick rider had problems with her horse on one of the key performance nights, so we shot at another private facility in Three Rivers as a double for the Salinas Rodeo.

How big was the crew?
For the Salinas Rodeo it was just me and a photo assistant that came down from Seattle. I showed him how to use an external sound recorder and he helped me navigate the menus on one of the cameras I rented. For the stuff we shot in Three Rivers the crew ballooned to two…at least on the three days that our local assistant showed up. Most of what’s in the film was shot by my friend Alex Bros who flew down from Toronto to do the shoot. It wasn’t an easy shoot by any stretch, but it was a great time.

We knew that what we were capturing was special, you could see it in the monitor. The beauty of the locations, the intensity of the stunts and then the subtlety of the performance. This little girl who had never acted before but she was such a natural that when you pointed the camera at her somehow could just see her inner thoughts.

Did you edit the film yourself?
I sent Wrangler a director’s cut, which was a gratuitous  2:40 in length. I’m not great with shorter cuts, especially since the music went with the film in a very particular way. I got very lucky with the post on this film. Some friends help me get it in front of Arcade Edit where the wonderfully talented Matt Laroche agreed to cut a :60 second version. Ben Freer of Fiddle Leaf did the mix and Dominic Phipps of Company 3 in London did the colour grade. I’m beyond grateful to all of them for elevating the film.