
Luke Gilford's 'National Anthem' Avoids Queer Archetypes
By Alaska Riley
Jul 12, 2024Director Luke Gilford calls his new film National Anthem “a Western for the New World.” It’s a love story, one that unfolds without over-explaining itself; a heartfelt rendition of rural America that portrays family as something you find and choose over and over again. The film paints a picture of what the human experience can be like when it wriggles out of you instead of being written like a rulebook to be followed.
The film follows Dylan (Charlie Plummer), a young construction worker with a distracted mother and endearing younger brother whom he both looks after in various ways, emotionally and financially. When taking a job on a ranch to make some extra money, Dylan meets a community of queer rodeo performers whose identities and relationships to each other are unlike anything he’s seen or known before, gradually finding himself entangled in and understood by their expansive ways of being and loving each other.
In that community we meet Sky (Eve Lindley) and Carrie (Mason Alexander Park), both strongly self-assured in their vibrant identities that reach out further than their queerness and introduce Dylan to new love and friendship. Both characters’ transness is gracefully skirted-over, allowing their humanity to shine through, offering a new take on the ever-so-easily overplayed dynamics of desirability and the capacity to be more than an archetype onscreen.
As the closing credits rolled at a press screening for the film a few weeks ago in New York, I rushed out of the theater holding back happy tears that would flow down my face when, to my surprise, the door opened to the lobby and I ran into Gilford.
I gave him a hug, pulled away to push back my hair with both of my hands, and looked him in the eyes to say only what I could muster — a tearful “thank you” followed by another big hug — before hurrying to the bathroom to make sure I made it back inside for the Q&A. I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude at being able to watch the film.
PAPER sat down with Luke Gilford, Eve Lindley and Mason Alexander Park to discuss the queer America uncovered in National Anthem, pride in a polarizing political climate, humanization versus representation and the impact of creating a safe space both on- and off-screen.I wanted to talk to you, Luke, first. You’ve said you grew up in Colorado and made your way to New York City as you got older. I grew up on a ranch in Florida and I fled to New York City when I was 20 years old. What was it like returning [to the Southwest] and finding community there?
Luke Gilford: I feel most inspired in nature. I love that there's no literal markers of who or what you can be in these wide open spaces. I also love the communities that form in these places. You kind of have to dig for them, sometimes. [But] queer and trans folks have been around since the dawn of time and they've been creating these safe spaces since the dawn of time, so I was just so inspired to come across these different rural communities and to be so warmly welcomed into them.
As someone who moved to New York, I sometimes feel survivor's guilt about needing a silver lining away from home. I think it's so cool that in the film these people's silver lining is very close to them.
Luke: That's something that both Eve and Mason really brought to it. I'm finding people really falling in love with those two characters. Audiences are being welcomed into the community as well.
Eve and Mason, your characters stood out to me because it didn’t seem like you were fulfilling a particular archetype. There's something to be said about humanization versus representation, and I think that both of your characters did that beautifully. What was it like to take on those roles that people need to see without having to explicitly say “I'm [trans], you should like me”?
Eve Lindley: I've been beat up and attacked so many times on screen that it's always nice to not have to be putting on prosthetic welts. It was really cool to play someone like Sky. The love interest element is always exciting, and it's something that I've felt really lucky to do in the past. The thing about Sky that was so new for me, and the thing that I struggled with the most was: I tend to play people who are so in their head, they’re doing all these mental gymnastics. Sky was just so in her body and so empowered. It was almost something that I didn't understand when we were making the film. Even the poster, it's like she's representing America, and there's something so daring and new about that.
What was it like to be uncovering a queer America to be proud of in such a polarizing – and often dangerous – political climate?
Mason Alexander Park: I found the experience incredibly liberating. The point of the movie is not to show trans trauma or show homophobia and gay bashing, or to highlight that as the reason why we're making the film; those things exist in the world around us, within the fabric of the piece and within the mind of the viewer. I think it's impossible to watch this film and not assume that a shoe's going to drop, or that something bad's going to happen to Dylan or Sky or Carrie. But what this film does so beautifully is subvert all that and just actually provide a portrait of rural America. It just so happens that the people that we experience that through are queer.
Seeing Sky be an object of desire, without her transness being the driving force of her desirability, was something that you don't see in the media — to see a trans woman just being beautiful and having fun and having threesomes and riding horses – and Dylan not having to ask her weird, invasive questions or feel guilty about having sex with her. Then also to see [Carrie] just be a good friend, not a drag mother. Luke, you've called this “a Western for the New World.” I wanted to hear more about what that means.
Luke: Westerns are so much about violence and domination, and I was so interested in making a Western that's much more emotional and about a soulful discovery of oneself, moving beyond these boxes and labels that cannot really contain us. I think that the flag really has come to be taken by the right as the symbol of America, but really it's supposed to represent all of us. I wanted to take that power back and say, “No, we can be cowboys and cowgirls too,” and we can be proud of this country, and we can be finding and building our lives in it.
You’re gonna make me cry again. I’m trying to be professional!
Mason: You’re doing great, sweetie!
Luke: Eve, how does it feel to be the poster girl wearing the flag?
Eve: It's really cool, it's really empowering. My mother's an immigrant and my father's father was a prisoner of war in World War II. I feel like I'm part of the fabric of what makes America. I know there's a lot of people out there who don't feel that way about me based on how I, you know, am. It feels really cool to say “I get access to this symbol as well. I get access to this world, and I have just as much a right to it.” We as trans people have just just as much a right to it as anyone.
I have a lot of conversations with my friends about all of the little trans kids that are still living in Florida where I left; I pray for an America where they don't have to leave to be as proud as we are to be where we are now. They deserve to be proud exactly where they are. Eve, I did wanna talk about the line, “I've been alone enough to know that it's not for me.”
Eve: I mean, for me on a personal level, and I think this is something that a lot of other queer people feel, you become a bit of a loner, you become a floater. You know, you can go into groups and sort of be a part of them, but you never really put roots down. For someone like Sky, I think this community that she has created with Pepe and Carrie and the House of Splendor, it's the place where she can be the most empowered and the most herself, because she doesn't have to be alone. She can move through the world with support and community. It wasn't really until I made this film that that community became important to me, but now I understand how important it is. It really changed my relationship to my own queerness and the queer community in general.
Luke: A huge part of us all becoming a little community on set was sharing music with each other and bringing out that tenderness and those emotions – all becoming a family together. It really did feel like Carrie and Sky were living, breathing people. We've taken that with us too, where, when we're all together, we just go right back into that mode. It’s just so important for us to create those spaces for each other.
Mason: That definitely speaks to the totality of the world-building that everyone was a part of. If we would have been reduced to tropes as these characters, I think it would have been really hard for those things to come across on screen and interpersonally. It would have been hard for us to find ways to connect. But anytime anything even felt like it was going in that direction, it was really easy for Eve and I to have a conversation with Luke and everybody was so quick to course correct: add in a funny joke here, or shift the way that something was said so that we could continue to create something that felt prescient but subversive, and not stuck in time as “this is what it's like to be queer in America.”
It's so cool that this movie wasn't just telling a story [about community] but that Luke was keeping that same magic alive when the cameras weren't rolling. That speaks a lot about who you are, not just as a director, but as a person.
Luke: Thank you. Something that I'm really proud of is the collaboration between all of us, all pushing each other to make the best work. Eve and Mason were not shy about telling me what would make them more comfortable and proud of these characters. I'm so happy that we were able to create a space where there wasn't a hierarchy. We were all coming together and encouraging each other to avoid these dangerous and lazy clichés and for there still to be hope – the way that even a proximity to queerness can open up our minds to new possibilities and new ways of thinking, and to move to the future with that.
Mason: Luke and I changed a few little lines in reference to Carrie's old partners and various things to create more ambiguity about the person that they were, because I wasn't really interested in leaning into what we expect from a trans person that does drag. I still wanted that person to maintain some sense of singularity and how they are experienced by an audience. A lot of it was just organic, small, itty bitty things that Luke was super excited to explore and really receptive of. I'm really grateful that we had that collaborative energy throughout the whole process, because it led to some really wonderful nuances within the film. It didn't change the structure of it by any means, it just elevated tiny bits and moments that made me believe what I was doing a lot more.
Eve: Luke’s taste level is so high. He had such a clear vision of what this film would look like and who Sky was. It was really scary to trust him because of what I was used to with characters I'd played in the past. Ultimately, Sky was an enigma to me. I had to turn to him to be like, “What is happening? Why is she like this?” But he always knew, so I had no choice but to trust the people around me, even kicking and screaming. That was the only way that I could get through that, to get to her, to get to Sky.
Luke: One of the scenes that I always think about is the lovemaking scene between Dylan and Sky in the barn. I just love the way that Eve performed that, because it brings a lot of the ethos of the film and topic to life. She's like, “I want to make sure you know my deal,” and I think audiences immediately go to the cliché of “Oh, this is the disclosure moment. This is when she's going to say she's trans.” But then it's like, no, no, not that. I'm just not going to date you.
It was one of my favorite moments. That's all the time we have. Thank you guys so much for being with me today, I cannot wait to see it again. It’ll be my third time watching it.
Luke: Thank you, see you in New York.
I’m already recruiting people to see it with me.
Photography courtesy of Luke Gilford
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