Ride or Die is a coming-of-age romantic thriller following Paula (Briana Middleton), a 22-year-old recent graduate and aspiring filmmaker who reconnects with high-school crush Sloane (Stella Everett) as they find themselves thrust on a road trip from St. Louis to California. It is the debut feature film from director and co-writer Josalynn Smith. We chatted ahead of its screening at the Manchester Film Festival next week.
This is the first time Ride or Die has been shown in a UK film festival. I ask Smith if this is an exciting prospect for her, and if they anticipate the British reception to the film to be any different from the reception in the United States.
“Yeah – I’m really curious about it because I’ve only seen the film with American audiences,” she tells me. “It’s not a funny film, but [I’m curious] how some of the humour is interpreted… we always have a bit of a sense of ‘oh, it’s going to do well in the UK or in Europe’ because we have a bit of a critique of American gun culture.” (I assure her, this will go down well.) “So we hope that it’ll do really well… I’m really excited to have it premier in Manchester.” Smith tells me she attended the University of Sussex in her third year, so the UK is always a special place in her heart. “I have a lot of nostalgia for the queue,” she laughs.
Before we get into her own film, we discuss filmmaking and writing more generally, and I express my reluctance to see the new Wuthering Heights adaptation.
Smith says, “I think that a lot of times, films can skate by on doing something shocking and having, like, a very strong visual language… be it animal cruelty or sexuality.” She points to familiar titles: Emerald Fennel’s Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things and The Lobster. “But what they lack is sometimes emotional payoff or a very poignant sense of catharsis… it seems like you’re looking for a world with more pathos.” She’s right – and Ride or Die has exactly this to offer.
Smith started out working on documentaries, such as the 2013 documentary Jim Crow to Barack Obama. She explains how this early education, married with her interest in feminist scholars “like bell hooks and Laura Mulvey,” is expressed through her “experimenting with form.”
“I’m really interested in feminist cinema, and what it means to look… I think that the pleasure of cinema [is] seeing something and knowing that, as an audience, the people on screen cannot see you and cannot perceive you.” In cinema, she says, “you don’t want to spike the lens, or break the fourth wall… In documentary, you’re more confronted as a viewer… because they’re usually looking directly into the camera. And so, something that I did in Ride or Die, is… as they’re going on this road trip journey, [Paula] is filming her love interest Sloane, and so most of it is filmed in traditional narrative style, but there are interludes where we are filming with a DSLR handheld and we’re looking into the camera. It’s a little jarring when someone is looking directly in the camera in a narrative, because you’re suddenly feeling yourself, as the audience… and that’s something that I pull a little bit from documentary… I’m always interested in ways to have a bit of oppositional gaze.”
“I really love those sequences because they work on so many levels,” Smith tells me, “One level makes you feel close to the couple on this road trip as they’re falling in love; you have another deeper level where you have Paula, who’s black, filming her white love interest and putting her up on a pedestal… in a way it’s a reversal of objectification in some ways. But then you have the next level where there’s finally a point in the film where things are getting deeper, and they’re in deeper trouble, and Sloane asks Paula to stop filming [her].” This “returning of the gaze”, as she refers to it, is inspired by Laura Mulvey: “It’s like she has this agency in suddenly looking back at Paula looking back at the audience, and the camera stops filming.”
Ride or Die is one of very few films with a central lesbian romance, so it’s notable that a significant number of these involve the characters embarking on a road trip – Carol, Love Lies Bleeding, Drive-Away Dolls, to name a few. I am intrigued why this pattern seems so prevalent, and how this trope informed the writing of Ride or Die.
“Embedded in the American psyche,” Smith says, is “this sense of manifest destiny… pioneerism [and] really true freedom rooted in going West.” But, this is full of complexities: a “foundationally racist and white supremacist” concept.
The road-trip trope is further complicated by queer subjects. “The road trip… is really, as a filmmaking genre, intrinsically American… other people do it too but it’s very much an American subgenre… When queer cinema tries it… a lot of what Ride or Die is about is about intra-communal strife within the queer community, when it comes to race. There are things that Sloane does that are unintentional, but [they’re] putting Paula in more danger, or there’s tiny microaggressions that are happening as they’re going out West… Sloane doesn’t realise the impact, or she’s often the cause of them. […] I think what I wanted to interrogate about the genre itself… was how freedom functions differently for visibly gender-nonconforming and black people, and the way they’re going to experience Western rural America even now.”
Ride or Die is certain of its own identity, because Smith is definitive about Ride or Die‘s true cinematic influence. “Ride or Die truly pays homage to Gregg Araki’s The Living End,” she tells me earnestly.
Being both black and queer, I almost expect a sense of fear or vulnerability from Smith in making a film like Ride or Die. Refreshingly, her answer is “No.” She explains, “I am really aware of so many great films and filmmakers that came before me… [so] I wasn’t fearful about that.” She does, however, express justified concern about the unfortunate realities of film culture and industry.
“I think a lot about the metrics of success, and […] would I be satisfied with the career of Cheryl Dunye? I want to keep doing this, but the odds are super low that I’ll win an Oscar, because it’s just not what I’m into, and no one would give me probably enough money to make a movie, ever, that’s like an Oscar.”
As a writer as well as the director, I want to hear more about Smith’s early creative process. I ask her what compelled her towards creating the central characters, Paula and Sloane.
“I think it was really inspired by my first baby queer relationship, like a lot of struggles and issues that I had… it was very much personal in that way,” Smith says, smiling. “I think that Paula and Sloane are two characters you can really fall in love with. I think Paula you immediately relate to because it’s really clear that the film is from her perspective, but Sloane, you immediately fall in love with her.” She refers to her affectionately as, “like a crazy tornado coming into your life, but you want to be a part of it, and there’s something really seductive about that… Or, I don’t know, a femme fatale for the 21st century that’s kind of deeper than a manic pixie, sexy, still. You know, that’s what I was thinking.”
We move on to discuss the challenging and satisfying aspects of developing Ride or Die’s script more generally.
“I think that what was most challenging was really bringing Paula to life… Because Paula is a lot like me. […] That was what was so great that my co-writer really brought to it. Alicia [Louzoun-Heisler] really knows me incredibly well, and could bring more [to] life. I almost have a tendency to Nick Carraway myself for instance… but that doesn’t work in a film. [Also] I personally am more so good with concepts, vibe, character, and I think my co-writer is stellar at making twisty plots, and so working together was really great synthesis.” Smith describes herself as “eternally grateful”, highlighting how “it was so hard to go at it alone for so long.”
Finally, I ask what Smith hopes people take away from the film.
“I look at “Ride or Die” as a Rorschach test for its audience. People will see the revenge narrative and Sloane’s ultimate motive with different levels of clarity. And as a filmmaker it’s exciting because I’m not writing for everyone, I’m creating for my community, and I’ll always prefer subtlety over trying to be overly explanatory and turning off who I believe my core audience is with being preachy or having really obvious dialogue like certain TV-Movies.
“In simpler terms, I just hope everyone’s onboard for a wild ride with Paula and Sloane. I hope everyone feels like it ends too early.”
Ride or Die is playing on Friday 27th March at ODEON as part of the 2026 Manchester Film Festival.
