Clifton Collins Jr. has memories of the race track from his childhood, but no nostalgia for them.
His father lived near Hollywood Park in Inglewood (now the site of SoFi Stadium, the $6 billion home of the Rams and Chargers). On the rare occasions his father would sober up enough to remember to pick him up for their time together, they’d go there.
Collins Jr. learned how to place a bet, but that was it. They wouldn’t go down to the paddock to get a closer look at the majestic thoroughbreds. All of what could have made these trips special was missing. His father mostly drank with his buddies.
“We’d walk from the trailer park to the liquor store, then across the street to Hollywood Park,” he told me last month. “That was my weekend with him.”
Collins also told me that he channeled the pain from those lost weekends — and from having a father who was always just out of reach — into his remarkable performance as Jackson Silva in the film “Jockey,” which is in theaters in select cities now.
The film follows Silva, an aging jockey, as he navigates two potentially life-altering storylines: The trainer he rides for most frequently gets a once-in-a-lifetime horse, and a young jockey with a mysterious past confronts him with a startling revelation.
“Jockey” is a sparse, raw film that unfolds like a Raymond Carver short story. Nothing is wasted, nothing is extraneous. The writing is taut but the cinematography — it feels something like a too-perfect documentary — shoves you into a story you probably had no desire to live through but won’t want to leave.
Collins drives the film but is supported by Molly Parker (as the trainer, Ruth Wilkes) and Moises Arias (as the young jockey, Gabriel Boullait.) “Jockey” provides such a realistic look at the realities of the day-to-day racing that underpins the more glamorous side of the sport — the public-facing events that make up the Triple Crown, for instance — because director Clint Bentley (who also co-wrote the film with Greg Kwedar) is the son of a jockey.
It wouldn’t have worked without the right lead actor. In fact, the story morphed to fit Collins’ ability to channel the yearning of an aging rider. It originally focused on the young jockey — on the new and rising and hopeful, as so much of the storytelling around horse racing generally does.
Ultimately this film, though, is about an athlete coming to terms with the end of his career, the ways it went awry and what it cost him in the end.
To prepare for this role, Collins tried to live like a jockey. He hung around the track (Turf Paradise, in Phoenix) and tried to blend in with the other riders. Like them, he did not chat much with trainers — or anyone else, really. He stuck with the jockeys and listened to them talk, in the way that they do, and absorbed.
That’s probably the feat here. Accurately portraying a jockey is especially difficult because even for those of us who have covered horse racing and been around the track they are extraordinarily hard to know and understand. First, there is the fact that they are willing to risk life and limb by clambering upon a 1,000-pound animal that may or may not care what the trainer, jockey or crowd wants it to do. “They are, pound-for-pound, the toughest athletes,” Collins told me.
More than that, though, they endure an existence that wouldn’t make sense to most of us. They barely eat. They attempt to sweat off weight anyway. They migrate to wherever the racing works for them. They get trampled and vow to return as quickly as possible.
They also must compete with each other for absolutely everything: They are vying to get the best horses from the best trainers every day. Then, once on the track, they must fight for every inch of ground. It’s brutal.
Collins is known for being exacting. He took it further than usual, this time: He cut off all communication from friends and family, save for two mentors he trusts implicitly (Samuel L. Jackson and the musician Slash) and his grandmother. He credited Slash for recognizing how consuming the role needed to be. There were times, during a lull in filming, when Collins was tempted to get away and the Guns N’ Roses guitarist dissuaded him.
“Slash is very masterful and humble and subtle and the epitome of an artist,” he said. “So he was able to tell when I was in certain zones of prep that sometimes I wasn’t aware of because I’d be so deep in the forrest and he’d have to very nicely nudge me or remind me, ‘Hey, it sounds like you’re kinda in the zone right now,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh my god, you’re totally right.’ ”
Instead of getting away for a weekend, Collins spent that time holed up in a Courtyard Marriott, talking to other jockeys. One of them, Logan Cormier, also acted in the film. He’s back racing after drug addiction drove him away from the sport for nearly 16 years, much of that time spent in jail.
Cormier’s character, Leo Brock, delivers one of the most memorable lines of the film. He’s just been badly injured in a fall and faces, as best, a long recovery that will cost him money he doesn’t have while preventing him from racing to make more anytime soon. Silva declines an invite to party with the other jockeys and heads to the hospital to comfort his friend.
They talk about why the do what they do.
“Out of all the things you do in life,” Brock says, “there’s that one minute that you feel like you’re the most important thing in the world because everybody’s watching you.”
The scene is beautiful and serene, distilling so much into so few words. It was also filmed under duress: Cormier, Collins told me, kept whispering to him to ask the film crew to move it along.
He had a race to get back to.
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