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Set on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, War Pony Marks the directorial debut of Riley Keough and Gina Gammell.

The California-born Keough is the granddaughter of rock'n'roll icon Elvis Presley, who has been building an impressive, risk-taking acting career in films like Andrea Arnold's American Honey, Lars von Trier's The House That Jack Built and, recently, in the Amazon Prime drama Daisy Jones & The Six.

Gammell, who met Keough after she moved to L.A., hails from Australia, where she studied film at the University of New South Wales. Together, they began to spend time at Pine Ridge, after Keough befriended indigenous writers Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy on the set of American Honey.

Gradually, War Pony evolved– telling the story of two young males, Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting) and Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder), on the rez.

While Bill hits on a scheme to breed dogs, Matho steals his father's drugs to sell – just two ways of surviving in what's known as the poorest Native American community in the US. Winning the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival last year – the award given to Best First Film, this beguiling mix of realism and lyricism is a perfect antidote to Hollywood blockbuster bombast. Time to saddle up... 

How did you two get to know each other?

Gina Gammell:  We were at a screening, I think, of American Psycho in Los Angeles. It's this thing they do in a cemetery called Cinespia. Every summer they've programmed films that are screened weekly. We met there and the rest is history. We're very, very fast friends, and very much a friendship first. Then we started collaborating on all sorts of things.

War Pony has been seven years in the making, right?

Riley Keough:  I do like to clarify, it didn't take seven years to make it... that's really amping it up! Seven years of work! But it was seven years of friendship, and then we made this thing kind of slowly, there was no end date, there was no real ambition. 

At what point, then, did you plan on co-directing a feature?

GG:  We'd play around with ideas, short ideas, feature ideas, but we never finished anything. We both kind of knew that we wanted to be doing more than we were doing. Riley wanted to do more than act and I wanted to do more than I was doing at the time, and so we knew that we had a good synergy. We knew that we had brains that complemented each other and that inspired each other, but we weren't seeking anything at all. We were just enjoying creating nonsense together. 

This project grew out of your friendship with co-writers Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy, who were both from the Pine Ridge Reservation where the film is set. How difficult was it for you to bring a crew into this indigenous community and start shooting? 

RK:  It ended up being, I think, a really beautiful exploration...is it possible to consciously, responsibly, collaborate between communities? And so I feel proud of what we were able to do as two communities. It was really challenging. It's not an easy thing, if you want to do it in a responsible way. You're gonna run into challenges. We had to bring a crew into a community that we had seven years of relationships with, that had never been there and don't know the nuances of the area. And now we're responsible for an entire crew that, God bless them, don't necessarily know the right way to walk into somebody's home, or just how to work in that community. So we're responsible for all of these people. Every day there were things we would run into, and it just became our mission to go, 'Ok, how do we do this out of love?' 

The film shows a lot of poverty in the reservation. Did you treat this as a social document in some ways?

RK:  I mean, look, it's an area of the world where there is a lot of devastation. Historically, it is one of the most devastating American stories there is, and the result of that very much exists systemically —in  opportunities, in the life that many people live. And, yes, I think that there definitely is an aspect... these stories should be told. 

In the film, there's a reference to Donald Trump. Was that intentional? 

GG:  That's a great question. I think we just forgot to take it out! [It was filmed when Trump was in office] right towards the end of his time, and also all through the writing of it, the birth of our friendship was in the middle of Trump getting elected or his campaign, and then how weird America is... but also how these huge government decisions that have so much impact on so many communities, especially communities like Pine Ridge. It's just also a sprinkle of a thing on everyday existence. Life doesn't stop when awful megalomaniac crazy people get put into office. I don't think anyone will ever be able to forget the Trump years in America, and it still feels like we're in the Trump years, what he represents. 

The film's style aims for naturalism, largely. Did you draw inspiration from other movies as you were filming?

RK:  We really didn't like to find inspiration in other films. We found inspiration in our collaborators, our writers, what they wanted. So for example, Frank and Bill... they didn't want handheld camera shots, they wanted to compose images. They didn't like the look of handheld films, personally, so we wanted to honour everything they wanted, how they wanted it to look. They wanted it to look beautiful, like that kind of an experience. But yeah, they didn't want it to be a jaggedy, guerrilla style. We just honoured what Frank and Billy wanted, really. 

What were the big challenges of directing non-professionals?

RK:  [Dealing with] things like, 'I don't want to do this any more. I'm tired!' Just life things, like doing it over and over again. 

How did you two work together on set?

GG:  Honestly, our working processes are really different, and how our minds work. We complement each other really well because we have such different strengths and weaknesses. 

Do you ever fight? 

GG:  It's little bickers. We just fight the whole way through set! It's a functional dysfunction. When we're fighting, it's always in service of something great coming out of the other end of it. There's always something from a disagreement that brings another level to whatever the disagreement was.

Riley, your earlier work, whether with Lars von Trier, David Robert Mitchell or Andrea Arnold, for example, suggests your tastes skew dark. Is that the case? 

RK:  I mean, I really just follow wherever my heart takes me. I like what I like, I suppose. But I like all kinds of things. I really appreciate romcoms, and I like comedies. I like all kinds of stuff. 

You took the film to the Cannes Film Festival where you won the Camera d'Or for Best First Film. How was that experience? 

GG:  An incredible honour! I think that really in our wildest dreams...someone asked Franklin, 'Were there many times you didn't think it was real?' He was like, 'Many, many times.' And I think we all felt that way. It was such an organic, slow, intimate, contained process from beginning to end... showing it on such a big global stage like the Cannes Film Festival was a contrast to the rest of the process of making the film. 

In Cannes, you also won the Palm Dog – the annual prize given to the best canine performance. What can you say about your poodle, Brit? 

RK:  Our dog Brit...she gave birth twice during our production. Once during principal photography, and then once when we were doing reshoots, and it was just insane. We needed her again, to shoot, and again she was about to give birth. So she's such a strong female!     James Mottram

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War Pony is released on 9 June — Book Now