STACK NZ Aug #65

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with NIKI CARO .

Based on true a story, McFarland, USA is set in 1987 in the struggling eponymous Californian town and is a classic sporting underdog story of how a dedicated coach (Kevin Costner) sets about building a champion cross country team at a predominantly Latino high school. The film marks the welcome return of Kiwi director Niki Caro, and below she talks about working with Costner, low-rider culture and the similarities between this and her breakthrough New Zealand hit Whale Rider .

moved me most was the resilience of these kids, and their emotional, physical and spiritual endurance, which makes them so perfect for cross country running. The town of McFarland is unremarkable in every way except for what these kids and this coach have done in terms of cross country running. What makes them so extraordinary is to have come from that place and to have achieved what they achieved. They have put McFarland on the map. Tell us a little bit about the town itself. McFarland’s a town in the Central Valley in California and is largely populated by Mexican immigrants. These are generations of field workers and their focus is on family, community and hard work. It has about 8,000 people in it. It doesn’t have a stoplight to my knowledge. It has a McDonald’s, but that would be the extent of the entertainment and the nightlife. It’s a very, very hot place. This is important because it’s a place that’s thoroughly agricultural; everybody who lives there works in the fields in some capacity, and fieldwork is about as difficult as it gets. You’re working outside in extraordinary temperatures doing really physical, manual work: picking fruit, oranges, grapes and the like. These kids are crazy remarkable in that they work,

Tell us a little about the narrative arc of the film. The story is about a man named Coach JimWhite [Kevin Costner], a football coach who loses a number of jobs and finds himself in McFarland, California, the very last place he wants to be. He realizes very quickly that the kids in the school are really bad at football. They’re small, to begin with, and football is just not their strength. But he recognizes that they’re also very, very fast. So he starts a cross country team. The high school had never had a cross country team before he

arrived, and, coincidentally, this was the first year that California had the first state cross country championship. The story follows Jim and this unlikely running team to the state championships and beyond. What first drew you to the project? For a lot of reasons, McFarland, USA is a very appropriate story for me to tell. It had been a long time since I’d made Whale Rider , but in all that time, 13 years, I’ve been looking for a comparable project and some story that I could make in a similar way, and McFarland, USA was it. What was it about the story or the script that spoke to you? The story spoke to me because it was real. What

Carlos Pratts and Director Niki Caro on set of McFarland, USA

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