For 'The Rider,' a dangerous stunt preceded the script

An internationally acclaimed movie about an injured Lakota rodeo rider on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota opens in theaters this weekend. Called "The Rider," the story is based on the real life of its lead actor.

"I would say it's about 60 percent re-enactment and about 40 percent fiction," said Brady Jandreau.

He was in the Twin Cities for the local premiere of "The Rider." It was the closing-night gala of this year's Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. It's just the latest of a series of appearances he's been making since the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year.

"It's just definitely not the world I am used to, I guess," he said. "It's a whole different circuit than the rodeo circuit. I have been traveling all over. I've just never seen myself as an actor, I guess, but I believe events in life tend to unfold as they should."

Jandreau made his living training horses, and riding horses and bulls in rodeos. Then one fateful night in the Fargodome, he came off a horse and things went bad.

"My foot hung up in the stirrup, and I went under the horse and she stepped on my head," he said.

He needed surgery and a metal plate to repair the damage. As in the film, against doctor's orders he checked himself out of the hospital as soon as he could. He also began training horses, despite warnings that any further injury to his head could be catastrophic.

"The doctor said he shouldn't be lifting 10 pounds," said director Chloe Zhao. "Just the saddle itself is a lot."

Zhao knew Jandreau from working on her first film on Pine Ridge, called "Songs My Brothers Taught Me." Originally from Beijing, she moved to London and eventually New York, but found herself drawn to the open spaces of the West and the people she found there.

She was thinking of using Jandreau in a film, but didn't have a story. Then she learned he was risking his life by training horses. She says for Jandreau to work in a grocery store, or indeed anywhere with a roof, was just a different kind of death.

"I wrote the script really fast," she said. "I wrote it in two weeks and just started shooting right away."

She'd been around Pine Ridge for a few years and the Jandreau family trusted her.

"We got to know Chloe pretty good," Jandreau said. "And like I said, she came out and rode horses with us, so why would we be scared to act in a movie?"

He observed that Zhao does many of the same things with actors that he does with horses. He calls her the actor trainer.

"The Rider" revels in the wide prairie and golden evening light of South Dakota. It follows Jandreau's character as he wrestles with how to live his life following his injury. Along the way, audiences meet other rodeo riders intoxicated with the adrenaline and the machismo of the circuit. They also meet Brady's friend Lane, once a champion bull rider, now under care as the result of a traumatic brain injury from a car crash.

The film has been an audience favorite on the festival circuit. Zhao said she believes that's because the entire story is based on the human connection she and her cinematographer had with Jandreau.

"It is a very human story," she said. "So that becomes universal. Because they are feeling that connection towards Brady that we felt."

On the strength of "The Rider," Amazon has hired Zhao to make a period movie based on the story of Bass Reeves, the first African-American deputy marshal.

Jandreau hopes to do more acting. When asked why he thinks audiences have latched on to "The Rider," he answered in true cowboy fashion: "I think the film leaves enough room for everybody to take home something important to them."