Interview with “Rebuilding” Director Max Walker-Silverman

Max Walker-Silverman’s debut feature, A Love Song, impressed with its combination of gorgeous cinematography and heartfelt performances. His follow-up, Rebuilding (which I reviewed out of the 2025 Middleburg Film Festival), showcases identical strengths in a brand-new story, set as before in the director’s native Colorado. Starring Josh O’Connor (La Chimera) as Dusty, a divorced dad whose family ranch is destroyed in a wildfire, the movie also stars a remarkable child actor, Lily LaTorre, as well as Meghann Fahy (Drop), Kail Reis (Catch the Fair One), and Amy Madigan (Weapons). I recently spoke with Walker-Silverman by Zoom on the occasion of the film’s theatrical release via Bleecker Street Media. What follows is a transcript of that conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed: Your last feature and this one both celebrate the rugged landscape of the American West. What draws you there and do you see your movies as presenting this landscape in perhaps a different way than do traditional Westerns of yore?

Max Walker-Silverman: What draws me there is home. I believe in regional filmmaking and rural filmmaking, and I like art that’s specific to a place. But I’m fortunate to not only call home a very beautiful place, but also one that just kind of happens to be linked to this long cinematic heritage. So the movies wind up looking like Westerns and being received as such, which is just a matter of circumstance more than anything else. And it’s fine. It probably makes it easier to make the movies when there’s a character in a cowboy hat, but of course that’s not necessarily the point.

I never grew up caring about Westerns, which is the main sort of type of movie where you would usually see buttes and mesas and plateaus and the rugged Rockies in, because they’re just kind of so tough and violent and there is a lot of bloodshed in the history of the place. No doubt about it. But there are also a lot of kind and gentle people, and those are the ones who I was lucky to be raised by, and I do hope to give them their due, as well.

CLR: In the press notes, you talk about your fear of climate change, which is certainly something we should all be afraid of. Beyond the kinds of things we see in the film, such as wildfire, how has it impacted the Colorado that you love? 

MW-S: Well, it’s drier. There’s less snow, there’s less rain, there’s less water in the rivers, there are higher temperatures in all seasons. And then there are all the other ecological effects that come along with that. There’s a huge tree die-off. There are changing insect patterns. Everything’s all connected. I look out my door and I see a big mountain that’s stunningly beautiful, but also all the pine trees are dead. That dichotomy kind of sums up the experience of life, perhaps.

CLR: So you’re once again working with your DP [Director of Photography], Alfonso Herrera Salcedo. By now, you two are really familiar with each other. Did you approach the filming of this movie any differently than your previous work, in terms of your communication and what you were looking for?

MW-S: We made a few choices early on; it felt quite different. All our previous work had been shot on film and had had a fairly stylized element, I guess you could say. And it was intentional and done with the hope of giving everything a little sense of the surreal and a skewed reality that was playing by different rules. And we made a few choices right away on this one to go down a different path.

One was to shoot digitally, which we did because I was aware that the movie featured enough characters who were a little bit caught out of time or a little behind the times that it could be viewed as nostalgic or perhaps even of a different era. And I wanted it to retain a sense of being very modern and contemporary—it’s a contemporary story—and also to shoot it a bit more naturalistically, so retaining some beauty and grandeur, but trying to call a bit less attention to the camera itself; let the world have a little more reality, not let the language of the cinema itself necessarily be as big of a character. I don’t know if we succeeded or not, but that was the thinking going in.

CLR: That’s really fascinating. What did you shoot on, if I may ask?

MW-S: It was the ALEXA 35, with some very contemporary lenses. 

CLR: The casting in this movie is perfect. Let’s start with Lily LaTorre, who avoids so many of the sometimes-theatrical behaviors common to too many child actors. She’s natural, and she’s not American, so she has to also be doing the accent. How did you find her?

MW-S: We did a big search for that role, and this one tape really rose to the top. And then it turned out that if you wanted to meet her you had to go to rural Australia. And so I found myself on a plane across the Pacific, asking myself, “What sort of lunacy is this?” But upon landing and renting a car and driving several hours into the interior, I found myself in a town just like the one I grew up in, with a kid a lot the way I was at that age, with dogs and chickens, and also insanely obsessed with books. And she’s just good, man, I don’t know: so professional and with a theater family; she had the dialect down, was so prepared.

She also was really taking a lot of cues from Josh O’Connor and his work, which was really appropriate because the character is kind of imitating her father, her father’s toughness and quietude and stoicism. And that became an interesting game of the actors imitating each other, the characters imitating each other. I think it wound up being a really awesome performance by Lily.

CLR: I agree. How did you land on Josh O’Connor?

MW-S: So often when I’m looking for actors, I’m looking for that someone who embodies the paradox of the tough and the fragile and the hard and the sweet. And he’s got that and there’s a great pathos to his presence, even when there’s a limit of dialogue or action, which of course, in this role of a man who’s been stripped of everything that defines him, is hard; there’s not a lot for an actor to work with. And you need someone who can do a great deal with quiet and limited activity.

And then beyond that, you need a kind soul, because the way we work in Colorado, you’re going to be surrounded by people who’ve never been on a film set before. There are going to be animals, there are going to be kids. You really need a nice person to hold that together and act as a leader, an example to all of those folks. And we sure got lucky with Josh; he’s just like a really sweet soul. 

CLR: Well, I’m glad to hear that because I think he’s one of the best actors of his generation. You also have Kali Reis, Meghann Fahy, and Amy Madigan, who just played Gladys in Weapons, and what a different role this is. How did you cast those three?

MW-S: The mission with all of those parts was really just that we needed great actors. We knew those parts were going to be professionals. And Meghann, I thought, did such interesting work on The White Lotus; she’s really a smart actor. Ultimately, these are all supporting roles and they’re all kind of playing their part in the movie in relation to the protagonist. And so you need people smart enough to subvert that and add a little bit of complexity, especially when the script isn’t full of drama and contention. You need people who can find the edge and the spark, even in a very sort of simple scene.

Amy is an icon of cinema. And I think that lends a gravitas to a character who’s kind of like an icon of the family and of their characters’ lives. And then with Kali Reis, there was an added interest, which was that she’s now a real professional actor and an outstanding one, but she was a boxer first and knows what it’s like to be a non-actor or a first-time actor. And a lot of the people who she’s working with in this film are non-actors and first-time actors and I figured that she could be a really helpful bridge between the professionals and the non-professionals and a mentor for those non-professionals. And she’s served that part really well. I think she’s terrific.

CLR: You talked a moment ago about the emotional restraint of the character. I think the biggest outbreak that Dusty has is when he throws a box in the trailer. I find it much more interesting to watch people wrestle with the desire to hold back the emotion and then it breaks through, rather than just emoting. How do you work with your actors to have them show this passion without over-externalization? That’s what draws me to your work, in particular.

MW-S: Well, I guess so much of the drama or the stakes of the film, the script, whatever, is what happens off screen, what happened before. And even though it becomes this sort of low-key simmer of a movie or whatever, the circumstances are still pretty severe, in this case of fire and loss. And I find that when you’re working with good actors, they really get that and understand that and carry that through everything, even the most mundane of gestures. And I show my affection for who they’re playing and my affection for the world that they’re inhabiting. That’s sort of like the bed on which things are built, of love. I just try to be there with them and let them do their thing and let them know I’m watching and trying to protect them from a crazy film set. But they’re the pros. I let them do what they do.

CLR: Well, they do it very well in your movies, and I really appreciate their work and your work. Thank you so much for chatting with me. I look forward to whatever your next project will be.

MW-S: I’ll do it for you. 

CLR: (laughs) Alright, thank you. Take care. Bye.

MW-S: See ya!

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Chris Reed is the editor of Film Festival Today. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.