Director’s Statement:

A deep-seated anxiety that frequently crosses my mind is that we have all the information in the world at our fingertips, and yet, our technology that gives us access to this knowledge, is more often than not used to as a tool for surveillance on us: to keep tabs on our interests, hobbies, predilections, and not only store it in databases owned by our governments, but also sell it to advertisers who can customize our feed, and by extension, our access to information to better serve their own financial gain. It’s a scary thought that our living authentic selves can be reduced to data for better sales practices.

I was faced with this exact scenario during a long layover at JFK airport with my brother, where a quick offhanded joke led to an exciting and energizing deep dive down an internet rabbit hole, searching for the history of horse meat in the United States, leading me to wonderful pieces written by authors such as Susanna Forrest and Upton Sinclair, that revealed how the food we eat can be inextricably tied to our history and our identity as a nation. Then, in the blink of an eye, I was already being shown ads about the upcoming Kentucky Derby.

From there, the germ of an idea, and a healthy interest in the seedy, strange world of horse racing and gambling, led to THE PREAKNESS.

THE PREAKNESS, on its surface, is a classic western: the story of hard-living rancher Jason Truelove, played by Jeffrey Pierce (The Last Of Us, Bosch, Castle Rock), who’s forced to fight back against the modern world come to demolish his way of life. Where our film diverges from this classic dilemma is in the way modernity is evolving, brought to life by Gena Shaw (Cobra Kai, Dopesick) as the ominous lobbyist Susie Sou, a woman who wields information overload as opposed to a six shooter, who uses the convoluted truth of an arcane law in the United States as a blunt instrument, showing us the futility of the individual in the Information Age.

I wanted not only to contend with this anxiety, but the mania of our obsessive search for information, and the way that it can enrich as well as drown us. And in finding the approach to cinematically represent this, I was drawn to one of the most immediate and frequently engaged sources of information in the modern age: the YouTube video essay. In tracing that lineage back to some of my greatest cinematic influences, who can be given credit for defining the cinematic “essay film” (filmmakers such as Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, or Oliver Stone), I found the approach to THE PREAKNESS.

In crafting this dense cocktail of old and new tradition, and multimedia cross-pollination, I chose several of my creative partners on the project with this instinct in mind: such as my editor Daniel Netzel, known for his inventive video essays on YouTube under the moniker Film Radar, as well as electronic music legend Dan Deacon. Combining that with influence and dedicated guidance from my mentor Francis Ford Coppola, who so ably merges expressionistic stylization with emotional depth and sincere empathy for the plight of his characters, I was able to make this sprawling tale of post-modern dread. A 21st century horror film to contend with the fear that our lives and our souls are known better by the government and corporations that we willingly give our money, our time, and ourselves away to.

- Akshay Bhatia