The camera is a predatory instrument. When you point it at real people suffering real tragedy, the line between documentation and exploitation becomes dangerously thin. In The Rider, Chloé Zhao navigates this ethical minefield not by shooting a straight documentary, but by constructing a highly specific fiction around a devastating reality.
Casting the Truth
Zhao did not cast actors to play cowboys. She cast Brady Jandreau, a genuine rodeo rider, shortly after he suffered a real, near-fatal head injury that ended his career. She cast his actual father, his actual sister, and his actual best friend, Lane Scott, who was left severely disabled by his own rodeo accident.
To film this with a massive Hollywood crew would have destroyed the intimacy of the Pine Ridge Reservation. Zhao operated with an incredibly small crew—roughly five people. They maintained a zero-footprint presence, frequently filming Jandreau training wild horses in real time. It is cinema verité executed with the sweeping, lyrical cinematography of a John Ford Western.
The Safety of the Script
But the true genius of The Rider is why it is not a documentary. By utilizing the structure of a scripted drama, Zhao provided her non-professional actors with what she has called a “refuge of fiction.”
If you ask a man to cry about his own broken life on camera for a documentary, he will likely shut down. It is too raw. But if you tell him he is playing a character—even a character named after him, living his exact life—the script acts as a shield. The fiction allowed Jandreau to safely access and express deep-seated trauma that he had refused to confront in reality. The artifice of the screenplay generated a far more profound emotional truth than any objective documentation ever could.
Insights regarding Chloé Zhao’s use of a “refuge of fiction” for non-professional actors and her minimal-footprint production model were synthesized from interviews in Reverse Shot and Film Independent.