Taylor Sheridan

It’s been a big week for Taylor Sheridan: His directorial debut, Wind River, just premiered at Sundance, and his screenplay for the western crime drama Hell or High Water received an Oscar nomination. Up next, Sheridan is returning to the world of Sicario with Soldado, a follow-up to Denis Villeneuve’s nerve-wracking 2015 thriller with Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin reprising their roles as dubious (to put it mildly) government agents. Plot details for Soldado have thus far been scarce, but Sheridan has finally shed some light on what Del Toro and Brolin’s characters will be up to in the new film.

If you know Taylor Sheridan’s previous screenplays, the drug cartel thriller Sicario and the heist movie Hell or High Water, then watching Wind River will occasionally feel like déjà vu. Character types, motivations, social commentary, even a couple of scenes (like a law-breaking interrogation in the back of a police car) reappear in a way that goes beyond an auteur returning to themes and ideas he finds particularly interesting. For the work of a first-time director, Wind River feels oddly familiar.

Let’s say you’ve been given three wishes by one of those C-list celebrities that keep appearing as the Ghost of Christmas Whatever in Hallmark specials. What do you wish for? Since I like to think of myself as a good person, I’d probably spend the first two wishes ridding the world of hunger and violence or cleaning up our carbon footprint with a snap of my fingers. But my third? That one I might waste on unlimited money, so I could continue to make movies that solidifies Emily Blunt as the biggest action star of our generation. Forget Scarlett Johansson; after The Huntsman: Winter’s War, Sicario, and Edge of Tomorrow, Blunt is the woman to beat in my book.