Following his stellar drama 45 Years, Andrew Haigh is back on the festival circuit with Lean on Pete, an adaptation of Willy Vlautin’s novel of the same title. One of our most-anticipated fall festival premieres, it recently debuted at Venice and ahead of our review, we have the first clip. Charlie Plummer stars as Charley Thompson, a fifteen-year-old who takes a summer job with a washed-up horse trainer and befriends a horse. With a cast also including Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Steve Zahn, and Thomas Mann, A24 is expected to release the film next year.
“Lean On Pete by Willy Vlautin is a wonderfully humane novel. It is a story of a kid that refuses to lose hope or heart despite the harsh realities of his world,” Haigh says in a director’s statement. “I found it immensely moving, tender and yet never sentimental. I wanted the film to have the same sense of purity. I wanted the film to look at life on the margins of society with honesty and respect. There was a quote that Willy used at the start of his novel by John Steinbeck which reads: “It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth”. I tried to keep that sentiment close to my heart throughout making of this film.”
See the clip below.
Lean on Pete will be released by A24.