Greg Kwedar, co-writer and director of Transpecos, began with short films and documentaries. After meeting his future co-writer, Clint Bentley, the duo hit it off over their shared appreciation for the border between the United States and Mexico.
Transpecos follows three Border Patrol agents (Clifton Collins Jr., Gabriel Luna, and Johnny Simmons) at a remote checkpoint. When they stop a certain car, its contents unveil a betrayal from within, and each must make a series of impossible decisions.
Creative Screenwriting spoke with Greg Kwedar on building the story from the world up, when to scrap a monologue, and what happens when you move the big reveal into the first ten minutes.
Writer/Director Greg Kwedar on set of Transpecos
What led you to the screenwriting partnership?
I dropped accounting and got into filmmaking. Because of the work I did in college at an orphanage in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, I had a natural passion for the border.
Clint had worked with immigrants in Florida and New York, when he was trying to become the next Bob Dylan. From working with these dishwashers and migrant workers, he learned more and more about the people he was working with and decided to travel the border, making a short documentary about the minute men and the migrant paths to the wall that drifted into the pacific ocean in San Diego.
On a camping trip in West Texas along the border with my wife in Big Bend National Park, we visited a remote section of the Rio Grande River, which separates Mexico from the US. You can’t tell the difference between the two if you had been dropped down into the middle.
I was skipping rocks on the Rio Grande and I thought it was really ironic that I was doing this on an international boundary. Two Border Agents came up and stood beside me, quietly watching the river. They never said anything or did anything, so when I drove away, I just kept thinking about these agents, and I wondered if they were now skipping rocks, but doing so while wearing that uniform that meant so many different things to both sides of the border conflict.
We touched on that briefly in the beginning of the film when they are screwing around, but that moment of humanity is where we got the idea, so Clint and I started building the film around that human moment.
Co-Writer Clint Bentley on set of Transpecos
How did these specific characters begin to take shape?
This film has been a six-year process. The research was very difficult to crack, because Border Patrol is somewhat of a secretive agency. We weren’t interested in the headline news version. Instead, we were interested in who they were as human beings. To get that story, we needed access, and Border Patrol didn’t want to give us that access.
So Clint and I would just drive out into the desert and find agents who were leaning against their pick-up trucks, drinking a gallon of water, and we would pretend to be Canadian tourists and simply ask what they did. That grew into real relationships, once they saw that we were not there to challenge their beliefs or critique the way they did their jobs, they decided to open up to us.
We were just curious about their humanity and the way they lived. With that, some real friendships began. We got to meet their families and drink beers in these one-stoplight towns. The characters began to grow from that experience in the field—that, along with research from articles and sociological books, literature and nonfiction.
In an interview, Aaron Sorkin once said (and I paraphrase), “You have all of these parties sitting in a deposition around the table for The Social Network. They are all telling the truth, but they are all telling different stories about what happened with Facebook.” So to allow each character to have a moment and see the situation through their eyes was how he could piece together the closest account of what really happened.
The exciting thing about our three characters is that they all have very different views of the job they perform, but somewhere in the middle is probably what it’s really like to be a Border Patrol agent. To take these three agents, with those points of view, and give them a crisis, with their different belief systems and experiences on the job—that’s a really exciting premise to follow.
Gabriel Luna as Lance Flores, Johnny Simmons as Benjamin Davis and Clifton Collins Jr. as Lou Hobbs in Transpecos
These characters do make the audience put themselves in the situation, in somewhat of a what-would-you-do mindset. What is it like writing such different characters within these grey areas of decision making?
We are really interested in worlds and building the setting from the world up. Then we want to know the characters involved and whether they are at conflict or with harmony within their settings. After that, we decide the story that we are about to tell.
Over the years, we did four or five page-one rewrites, among the other countless drafts. But every time, the world itself would stay the same, and we would add more details. From the outset, the first words we ever wrote down, involved those three characters—back in 2011.
So the story changed a great deal—even among whom the key protagonist was or when we would reveal the agent that had turned before the end. That draft held for a long time.
It wasn’t until right before we shot that two things happened: we thought the story should happen in a single shift over a 24 hour period and we thought that we should find out that the agent had turned within the first ten minutes. With that, the story was more about the consequences of what would happen next.
Johnny Simmons as Benjamin Davis in Transpecos
As a viewer, we feel sympathetic for each character, despite their inner struggles. Can you elaborate on their differences?
When we narrowed it down to one day on the job, we had to establish that there was a history and brotherhood between these men, along with their different points of view about the job they have. That would create that later conflict.
If we had to assign points of view, Flores (Gabriel Luna) is the soul, the middle brother. He’s the beating heart who carries his work with professionalism and empathy.
Davis (Johnny Simmons) is somewhat of the fresh-faced recruit, as he is the young agent who came in with a certain ideology of the job, but then found out it wasn’t the old days of writing around on horseback and Señoritas, but it was more about paperwork and long days in the hot sun.
Then Hobbs (Clifton Collins Jr.) is one of the old guards, who is from that better time of cowboy hats, when a college degree couldn’t stop a bullet. Back then, agents only got a job if someone died or retired.
Today, we see posters that read, “Do you like the outdoors? Join Border Patrol.” So there are these different eras between the men, but there is also a history within the brotherhood that mixes with these new ideas about what the agency is.
Clifton Collins Jr. as Lou Hobbs in Transpecos
In addition to the time spent with the actual agents, what other types of cinema or literature inspired you to tell this story?
The low-hanging fruit here would be Cormac McCarthy, both his work and the treatment of the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men—the sparseness and the beauty of his writing, along with the duality of nature. It’s a place of peace and beauty that can also take you out.
We were also inspired by Badlands (Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek) from Terrence Malick. Then, there was The French Connection (Gene Hackman), in terms of partnership and brotherhood as they are chasing these unknowable, moving forces, like how crime is a storm cloud.
There is also some influence from this new wave of Mexican cinema that has happened in the last twenty years. Y Tu Mamá También (Diego Luna, Gael Garcia Bernal) and it’s naturalism, along with the spirit of that movie is great.
We wanted to give that feeling of placing an audience with the characters, and then presenting an impossible crisis so you are planted with these characters. Amores Perros (Gael Garcia Bernal, Emilio Echevarria) from Alejandro G. Iñárritu is another great example. It’s a downer, but it has a naturalistic approach that reveals great truth.
Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss in No Country for Old Men
Is there one thing you learned over the past six years of writing this movie that you wish you had known in the beginning?
I had read this in interviews, but as a writer/director, there are elements within a script that make it an imperfect document for filmmaking. The intended medium is a finished film, so there are things within the script that need to be done to tell the whole story. You have to do more, so when you do have performers, a camera, and a setting, the crew can take those elements and enhance them.
There were times that we realized that we didn’t need everything on the page, but you have to write it to understand what the feeling should be. It almost creates an openness to discover on set. The writing leads you to the place, but the lesson is to let it happen naturally on set.
As an example, there is one scene where Flores and Davis are standing over blood on the ground. It’s the night scene where they are carrying flashlights, and we had named the Canyon, and developed this mythology that Satan has fallen from heaven and he blew his trumpet and we were going to tell this historical story that we had invented, with the wind blowing through the canyon.
So Flores, played by Gabriel Luna, says, “I’m not going to be giving this history lesson with my partner’s blood on my hands.” With that, we were like, “Ah, you’re right. You’re in the place, so there is a physical reality there.”
So what should it be? We talked and he said, “This is our blood. This is our family,” and that was it. We dropped the whole monologue in just two lines, but we wouldn’t have discovered that if we had not written it.
What do you find to be the most difficult part in the writing process?
I’m all about ideation. Stories come natural to me. Clint always jokes that I carry three different notebooks with me: a small one in my pocket, a medium, and a large elsewhere, and while there are grocery lists in there, I also have ideas of where the story can go. I love the ideation phase. I love the research phase and pulling together details and interesting textures—I’m hungry for that.
Sitting down and following through to get that first draft done is the challenge for me. The first draft of Transpecos we wrote was written longhand, in a notebook. Something about not having that editor of the backspace key hanging over you so you can write until the end and scribble notes in the margins, seems so tactile—to have a completely full notebook of a movie in it.
By the time you move it to the computer, you’re really just editing it and transcribing, when compared to how you started. I just never want to be the writer that writes the first ten pages 200 times, over and over again, never getting to the end of the script.
Gabriel Luna as Lance Flores in Transpecos
When writing freehand, do you write linear, beginning with page one?
A writing partnership is almost like figuring out what to do when you’re dating someone, in the beginning. Our partnership grew around this project, so when we started out, we notecarded and worked on the treatment, and wrote the story without the parameters of a format.
With that, it could be 15 pages or 30 pages, but it was just ideas in a word document. So we started from the beginning, but it was more about who had the best take on a certain scene, and then we would rotate from there.
I think we benefited the most from the treatment pages as we discussed where we wanted to go, but within the script writing, we could then take left or right turns and even go in circles, to find the path of the script.
Is there anything else you would like to share about the film or could you touch on any upcoming projects?
If you do get a chance to see the film in the theater, I would recommend it, because we did take a lot of time to film this vast, beautiful landscape for this adventure story. In addition to the landscape, we did the sound at Skywalker Ranch, and those guys are pure geniuses so that sounds better in a big theater with surround sound.
Ultimately, this film is a divisive topic, but we never intended it to be a message-film, from a political standpoint. It is a human film about a complicated topic, so we can find the connections between people and take down some of those walls that divide us.
Featured image: Johnny Simmons as Benjamin Davis, Gabriel Luna as Lance Flores and Clifton Collins Jr. as Lou Hobbs in Transpecos.
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