On the day of the theatrical release of his debut film, “Take Me to the River,” director Matt Sobel took a few minutes to chat with us about the 2015 Sundance darling. The film stars Logan Miller as Ryder, a gay teenager from LA who is none too pleased when his parents decide to drag him to rural Nebraska for a family reunion. The ensuing collision of value systems causes tensions to rise — eventually threatening to expose a painful family secret. We talk about how a nightmare inspired the film’s story, his likeness to the protagonist, Ryder, and dissecting what his family’s saying “If it don’t scare the horses” means to him. We begin:

Was the idea for “Take Me to the River” something you’ve been holding onto for awhile?

Yeah, I wrote it my senior year of school. I didn’t go to film school [Sobel studied fine arts at UCLA] but I always knew how I wanted the film to feel. I was figuring out the logistics and the industry on my own, so it was a bumpy ride to say the least.

This film felt and looked exactly like my family reunion in Idaho a few years ago. Eerily similar. How personal was this film for you?

The farm in the film is my family’s actual farm in Nebraska, and I grew up going to that family reunion. The location and set up is entirely real. [Like Ryder] I was the only cousin not from Nebraska. For example, the scene where his cousins ask him to draw them all pictures, that was me. Another similarity about my family [and the family in TMTTR], which has maybe been heightened from heritage, is the inability to speak about interpersonal issues. That is a very midwestern mentality. My family has a saying, “If it don’t scare the horses.” What they mean by that is if it doesn’t disturb business on the farm, then there’s no business in talking about it.

Is it fair to say you purposefully pushed audiences to the brink of their comfort zone?

Definitely, I wanted to push viewers in the writing of the script, but especially in the editing. I was always looking for opportunities to not allow the audience a traditional moment of relief. In many films, there is a balance of mounting tension followed by relief. It is a little unorthodox to cut out all of the moments of relief, but that’s what we did here. An obvious example of this is the scene with Ryder (Logan Miller), his Uncle Keith (Josh Hamilton), and the loaded gun. The result we wanted was the slow broiling, ratcheting up of tension.

This being your debut feature film, what are you most proud of?

I feel like capturing the uncanny dreamlike tone was the hardest part. The idea for the film came from a nightmare and I wanted it to feel that way in the movie. It’s hard to recreate the feeling of a dream in a film because usually they feel overworked. While you’re dreaming, the events taking place don’t seem so strange, just a little off, but you can’t understand why. I would say Take Me to the River is closer to uncanny than surreal because it is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. I realized the creepiest thing would be to shoot it like an awkward scene out of a comedy. We wanted to send the audience mixed signals about how they should feel in a certain scene, and I feel like we achieved that. That was the most rewarding because we spoke about achieving that visceral aesthetic the most out of everything.

What were you looking for in casting your actors?

Robin Weigert has an incredible mind, she is an intelligent, brilliant person. When she came on the project, we spoke regularly about elaborating the backstory in different drafts of the script. The draft that she read when we began was markedly different than the one that we ended up shooting. She had quite a lot to say about the topics of childhood sexuality, the role that shame plays in adults chastising children for what is a natural exploration of our bodies. Her input was really invaluable. With Logan, I was looking for someone who seemed to be completely at ease in this world of extreme awkwardness, someone who was able to bounce back and forth between wanting to scream and wanting to laugh. While he maybe wasn’t the most obvious, he was the right choice. His intuition would always be in the right emotional space. With Josh Hamilton, I was looking for someone who would surprise us, who wasn’t instantly readable as “the villain”. He would rise out of the ensemble and unnerve us with deadpan motivation.

Rivers usually symbolize rebirth or baptism, but in this film, it doesn’t seem so pure.

Yes, we had extensive conversations about symbolic nature of the river. I feel like it does represent a sort of baptism, a coming-of-age. However, Ryder’s coming of age doesn’t end with him finding his path in life, he’s actually less sure about life than before. He began overly confident in himself but ends up feeling like the world’s more gray. Because of this, I like to describe Take Me To The River as an inverted coming-of-age story. This is more what ‘real life’ coming-of-age is like—the moment when you realize you don’t know as much as you thought you did. I’m also interested in equating growing up with a type of baptism, or more specifically, a reverse baptism. Becoming an adult, as I see it, is more of a muddying than a cleansing. That’s also why we chose the image for the poster- the symbolism of Ryder lying on the river bank with mud on his body.

What was it like showcasing the film at Sundance in 2015?

The first time I went to Sundance was on a family trip when I was 13, and the first movie I ever saw was Memento. We had tickets for another movie later that day but we decided to skip it and just go to dinner and talk about what we just watched. For me, that became the mark of a film’s success or not- if you want to keep talking about it after the movie’s over. We actually screened Take Me to the River in the same room [the Library Theater] that I saw that first film, Memento, in, so it’s been very special. 

What’s next for you?

I’m attached to direct the screen adaptation of Maggie Stiefvater’s New York Times bestselling young adult novel, The Scorpio Races, which couldn’t be more different. This film taps into another part of me. Growing up my favorite film was Jurassic Park, and this film falls in the same vein as that. The chance to make young audiences feel like I how I felt about Jurassic Park, I couldn’t pass that up. I’m also writing a science-fiction film that’s set in China about 2 orphan sisters who are recruited by a Chinese sports camp to be trained as Olympic synchronized high-divers.