Fresh into the renaissance of queer road movies is Ride or Die, the punchy and resonantly personal feature debut of Josalynn Smith that made its world premiere in the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival’s US Narrative Competition. Here we have Paula (Briana Middleton), a young Black aspiring filmmaker from the Midwest, who stumbles into her high school crush, the breezy and impulsive Sloane (Stella Everett). The meeting and melding of the two tumbles us headlong into a cross-country roadtrip toward Los Angeles that brings them closer but also unearths deep trauma and illuminates how each of them see the world—and are each, in turn, seen by the world.
On the occasion of the film’s premiere, we spoke with director and co-writer Smith to learn more about the careful crafting of the two main characters, leaving stories open to interpretation, and being inspired by queer cinema from the ‘90s—all to make Ride or Die one of the most memorable queer road movies of recent years.
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Purple Hour: I love that we get such a strong sense of character right from the start. We can recognise ourselves or our friends in Sloane or Paula. Can you talk a bit about the characters and how they were written and moulded?
Josalynn Smith: There are elements of characters that are definitely pulled from life—Paula is pulled a lot from myself. When I originally wrote the script, I was writing by myself. I then brought on my co-writer, Alicia [Louzoun-Heisler], and what she really did for me, even before I brought her on in the notes process, was push for more from Paula. It’s really hard to look at yourself and give that character more backstory, but just because my co-writer knows me so well, it really brought that side to life. Briana [Middleton], who’s such an amazing actor, really embodied her. I probably don’t even have a sense of coolness to complement the stoicism. She does so much with her eyes—all those micro-movements in her face. Whereas Sloane is like a composite of a few people that I know. I would say a lot of things from before the two get on the road were taken from real conversations. It’s super personal, at least in that first act—the family dynamics, the chocolate thing, and all of that eating Taco Bell—all of those things come from a real place.
This idea of unresolved family trauma, especially for queer and sapphic folks, is very omnipresent and rings very true. Did you feel like you had to strike a balance between these heavier elements and elements of, for instance, queer joy? Were you thinking about these themes in conjunction with each other?
First, I’m actually curious if I can ask you a question. What do you think—why do you think Sloane had a vendetta against her dad?
At first, I think it came across in the sense of being like “you’ve deserted me”. After Sloane’s sort of bubbling rage and deep-rooted pain takes over, as well as Paula having pointed out her sexual fantasies, I was thinking about whether that alluded to something else related to sexual abuse or similar elements.
It’s really interesting—I think a lot of the film is like a Rorschach test. Obviously, when you make the movie and this type of script, there’s so much more, while in the editing process, you pull back. I wanted to learn more into some art film stuff of not over-explaining, having subtle characters. I actually think there’s too much of a trope of lesbian processing—that they should have a lot of unprocessed conversations and emotions, but I think everything doesn’t have to be so said out loud, because it’s more like real life. It has been really interesting how audiences read the end of the film. This is not scientific at all, but through the screenings, I’ve noticed that a lot of women read some kind of sexual abuse. Then some audiences haven’t necessarily read that; they might just think it’s straight abandonment. I think that’s really interesting. I don’t want to give the audience a definite answer when it comes to that, because I think, first of all, that women should have secrets. We don’t need to know every single thing about people who have experienced abuse, for instance. We don’t need to be privy to all the trauma, because I think women are often put on display as victims. I think baking it into a character can make the queer joy that much more joyful and real. I was very careful with not having Sloane’s trauma on display—that was really important to me.
There’s been what I’ve been calling a renaissance in the queer road movie—there was Drive Away Dolls but also Dreams in Nightmares on the festival circuit, for instance. Does this kind of structure resonate with you?
The road trip and the Western are such quintessential American genres. When we look at the history of film, especially with something like the road movie, it’s quintessentially American in some ways because of cars. I’m in New York City right now and the American landscape is so vast, and there’s so much beauty and country. It’s very much core to who we are as Americans in some ways. If we distill down the common aesthetics of American cinema, I think the Western and the road trip and the big open skies of the West are part of that. I will also say that this is my first film—it’s my baby. I always really loved road movies, but as a filmmaker in general, I’m really interested in the aesthetics of Americana and what it does when you put queer people, when you put Black people in those spaces” This research into the huge lesbian road trip is really interesting because the road trip and going out West is baked into America’s history with the idea of “Manifest Destiny”. In Ride or Die, there’s a push and pull—Paula’s experiencing these micro-aggressions, but Sloane is causing problems and fixing problems because of being oblivious. Also, her whiteness allows her into certain spaces and can give it more of a shot than Paula throughout the film.
Do you have any personal inspirations when it comes to road movies or otherwise films that you thought about when it came to the visual elements?
This film is hugely inspired by Gregg Araki. I love The Living End and Doom Generation. It’s very gritty, kind of in your face and queer. I never lived the ‘90s, but I wish I did, and this is my homage to that.
I’m a Kaboom fan myself.
My favourite of his films is Mysterious Skin, but he had many films under his belt before he got to that. I love Terrence Malick‘s Badlands. Thinking about colour choices, I took a lot of notes from Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All. When you’re thinking about what the film is going to look like, what are the colour temperatures and the aesthetics of middle America—that was also an influence, especially aesthetically. It’s not a road movie, but there’s a little homage to [Cheryl Dunye’s] The Watermelon Woman in the film. We have a cameo from Guinevere Turner—it’s very subtle, but in the costuming, she’s wearing some crosses. Her story is really outlandish and it’s something that Sloane would also say if she were an older woman. She likes to take people for a ride and tell a story, even if it’s not true, and they both do that in the film. I’m super inspired by, especially ‘90s, queer cinema in the making of this.
You traverse different landscapes throughout the film. From a more practical sense, what did the shoot look like?
I’m from St. Louis, Missouri, so I had a sense of what was available, landscape-wise. I knew we would be able to shoot a large portion of the film in St. Louis. While I was writing, I was just looking at Google Maps. We ended up getting the green light like two or three weeks before we shot, which was insane and very challenging to pull it together in that short amount of time. I drove from LA where I live now to St. Louis, and I stopped at all the places I Google Mapped and really figured it out. Big Water, Utah, is just as beautiful as it is in person. We saw some nice highway passes in Colorado while coming out, and then we went to this psychiatric museum in St. Joseph, Missouri. It’s in the DSLR film footage montages. We got to Aspen at around midnight. I was like, if we need to make it to St. Joseph before 5 pm to go to this psychiatric museum, we need to get up at four in the morning. So we did that—and I got to see two shooting stars, so I guess that was worth it. But it’s a sign it was meant to be. We shot with actors for 13 days in St. Louis and around two and a half days in St. Joseph, two and a half days in Page, Arizona, and Big Water, Utah—they’re 30 minutes away from each other. As we drove, we shot the B-roll on the way.
Indie filmmaking at its finest—I love to hear the kinds of processes that go into a final product like this.
It was super challenging, but it was so worth it. Shooting in Page, Arizona, really kind of made the movie because it opened it up so much. It’s also breathtakingly beautiful and it heightens that third act that brings us to allegory—the highest heights of our bittersweet, tragic end. We shot most of the film on an ALEXA Mini, and then we shot some scenes on the DSLR. I think that the contrast of the DSLR footage and the film itself kind of breaks the third wall, cueing us into Paula’s perspective and Paula’s fantasy of making this movie and putting this white girl on a pedestal. It’s on a high and it’s fun until we begin the third act, and they have that shot at night—then it isn’t. Actually, Sloane is an object of desire, and suddenly—she returns the gaze, Laura Mulvey style. She’s like, stop filming me. Often, it’s a white filmmaker objectifying a Black character, but here, they’re both on equal and unequal footing throughout the film. I love having these contrasts, which cut into that and show what’s really happening. It leaves us space as an audience to wonder what’s in between the camera turning off and telling her to stop filming, and then they’re back in the car arguing. What do they talk about and what happened? What are they privy to that we aren’t? It brings us that closeness but also really makes us realise that there are things we also don’t know. It’s something I really worked on crafting in the edit.
The feminist storytelling structure was also really important to my co-writer and I. Often, you have this three-act structure: a hero goes out and is going to exert some of his will into the world because he is a man. Going back to [María Irene] Fornés and Sarah Ruhl, and now Céline Sciamma saying these things about screenwriting and storytelling structure being motivated by a desire and pushing or pulling against desire—what gets them to each be in the story isn’t based on the will that they insert into the world. Paula’s and Sloane’s desires—their desires for each other, their desires for everybody—are all pushing the story forward.
