Riley Keough may have come from privilege as the granddaughter of Elvis Presley but that too fell short when she had to look for funding for War Pony alongside Gina Gammell.
In an interview with BBC, the Daisy Jones & the Six star, 33, that she and British-Australian director struggled to get their first film funded.
“There’s a lot of talk and I think there’s some great effort, but I don’t know if the people who are making those decisions are totally there yet,” she said of making the indigenous movie.
War Pony, produced by Keough and Gammell, originated from Keough’s friendships with Franklin Sioux Bob and Bill Reddy, whom she met at Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Indian reservation when she was filming American Honey.
Reddy and Bob, along with Gammell are also writers for the film, which received the Caméra d’Or award for best debut feature at the Cannes film festival last year.
“I don’t know if some have caught up on the concepts that women can be in positions of power and can be trusted,” Keough told the outlet.
“You have two females making their first feature with a completely indigenous cast of, quote unquote, no value in terms of the marketplace and no movie stars,” she continued.
“We see this a lot because Gina and I have a production company and we see the money that’s given to men versus women, first-time filmmaker or not. And it’s really an issue still. At the end of the day, we had wonderful financiers who understood the vision and came together and supported us, but prior to that it was really depressing, you know.”
At that point, Gammell added, “We’d be finishing a week of shooting and we were making phone calls trying to get the next week of shooting paid for.
“And we were really lucky that we got through it, and we only just managed to get through it. It was incredibly tough.”