'You get in the car, you go somewhere, you have an experience'

Omaha, which premiered at Sundance 2025 and is out on release in the US today, is the sort of small indie gem of a drama that doesn’t come along too often. First-time director Cole Webley, working from a script by Robert Machoian (The Killing Of Two Lovers) crafts an intimate and moving story of a single dad under pressure. Reeling from loss, a dad (John Magaro), packs his 10-year-old daughter Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and six-year-old son Charlie (Wyatt Solis) into the car in a hurry one morning and sets off with them and their golden retriever Rex to a destination only revealed late in the film, but which packs an emotional gut punch.

It’s an observant drama which largely plays out within the confines of the car and rest-stop breaks along the way, and one which requires considerable skill from Magaro in order to get the best out of his young co-stars. When I caught up with the Past Lives star and Webley over Zoom ahead of the film’s release, they said being parents themselves had had helped with that process.

Cole Webley: 'It was such a team effort' Photo: Bentley Rawle

“Most of the principal people there, including our cinematographer, our producers, a lot of the artists who were around, are also parents so I think there was, first of all patience with young kids, and an understanding of how to deal with their moods and the ebbs and flows of those moods," says Magaro.

“So I certainly think it helps being a parent yourself and then, with Cole and I, who are much closer to the kids because we're right in with them, I think it gave us patience and an understanding of how to get the performance that we needed out of them. Especially with Wyatt, because he's not really an actor, he’s just a kid, which is what Cole was looking for and is, in a lot of ways, what makes it so special.”

Webley says a lot of the great performance from young star Solis stemmed from Magaro and Belle Wright understanding what was needed.

“It was written for a six-year-old and when we went into casting this movie, the obvious producers’ and production advice I got was, ‘We’ll cast an eight-year-old and have him act like a six-year-old',” Webley says.

“And I think my lead producer, Preston Lee and I just understood that was not going to create the magic that Wyatt Solis was. So having John and Molly understand that the scene had to come alive, but they still had to keep us on the tracks. So they would kind of co-direct those moments with him that would elicit the brilliance that is his six-year-old self that came across the screen. So I owe a lot to them for keeping us on the rails there.

“But it really was based on great writing and knowing those conversations and what kids say and Robert, having written with his own kids in mind, and me having raised my kids through that age but with the memories of those conversations and what it was like to be on those road trips. So I’d Iove to not take full credit for this because it was such a team effort in that car, to get the brilliance of these moments.”

John Magaro: 'We were lucky to be shooting in some of those places, somewhere like the Salt Flats has a magic to it' Photo: Greenwich Entertainment

The director – who previously made shorts including Con Amor and 10:17 – is full of praise for Magaro, whose career seems to have picked up momentum recently, with roles in films as diverse as Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Frankenstein reimagining The Bride and will soon be onscreen in UK cinemas as Keith Jarret in Cologne 75.

Webley says: “I’ve got to say this about John, John is a leading man in an everyday man persona. And that's not to say, John doesn't have a captivating presence. I used to tell John every day, I couldn't stop shooting his profile because I thought he was so handsome and statuesque.

“I've talked about this, that I was so excited about John coming and playing this dad because it’s such a leading man kind of role and John has this magic ability to come across as unassuming when you see him across the room and then when you get into his orbit he just is so captivating and and powerful. So I was really lucky that thankfully we had some friends in common that were able to kind of nudge him and say, ‘Read this script’, then the writing did the rest and then John put some trust into me.

“I think John has finally entered this grown-up version of John Magaro that I think is really, really, really cool, and exciting. And more and more people are going to know that.”

In terms of shooting within the confines of the car, the first thing was, as Webley puts it, “to cast the car”.

He adds: “I found that car as a home for this family and I wanted it to have a part utilitarian concept in another part family, a little rustic. But also there was how small and how big it was and who was sitting where and doing tests and shooting with Paul, discovering how we would create this cocoon for this family as they travelled across this wide expanse.

“So I really juxtaposed the interior world of the car with lots of very wide shots of the exterior, which would probably come to anyone naturally but I wanted the film to feel more like a photo book of a photographer travelling through the West than a cinematographer with a capital C.”

Magaro adds: “What I would say is there was nothing to hide behind. This was really people in a car, I think we only used a process trailer [a specialised piece of kit used to transport a car to make it look as though it is on the move without the actor having to drive it] for one or two days. It wasn’t very much. So very practical. On a bigger budget film, a lot of that interior of the car would have been on a stage – a Hyperbowl-type stage or processing stage, where you have a lot more control over it. This was on roads that a lot of times we didn't own, in the sense so that we could shut down the roads. If we could kind of control the road, it was for a very limited amount of space, so you really were working with what you had.

Molly Belle Wright, John Magaro and Wyatt Solis in Omaha Photo: Greenwich Entertainment

“It was close quarters in the car because you had Paul Myers, our cinematographer, in there operating the camera and you'd have a sound guy in the back in the trunk mixing the sound. So it was a ragtag operation but that's what Indie filmmaking is and luckily we had this the beauty of the American West and into the midwest, as you get into Nebraska, so there’s this landscape that is quintessential Americana. We were lucky to be shooting in some of those places, somewhere like the Salt Flats has a magic to it.”

There’s a lot of poignancy in the film, and it will take a hard heart not to shed some tears once the family reach their destination but there are also lighter moments, including an in-car sing-a-long to Tommy James and The Shondells’ Mony Mony, which harnesses the children’s energy to the point where the interior of the car feels a bit like organised chaos. So was it hard for Magaro to stay in character with Solis rocking out in the back seat and slapping the back of the driver’s chair?

“Oh yeah, the hitting of the back of the seat…” says Magaro with a laugh, “I love Wyatt but he's a six-year-old boy and a six-year-old boy can be a bit much at times. So, much like your own kids, you love them, but they also can start to annoy you a little bit. You love them and you're patient with them but a six-year-old will do things that are cute, but after about 20 times, you're like, ‘All right, that's enough’. So I really started to feel this dynamic in that car out there being their dad. If you shoot six hours in the car, Molly, in a lot of ways, was like Ella and Wyatt, in a lot of ways, was like Charlie.

“Molly was ten at the time, she's on the verge of her teenage years. She's seeing the world differently, observing, thoughtful and Wyatt is like the ball of energy that he is, and totally innocent. We did crack up, but we also wanted to embrace the silliness of things too because it is such a heavy film. So if Wyatt was making me laugh then we would laugh and go with it.

“It wasn't like, ‘Don't let it make you laugh’. It was like, ‘Let it make you laugh’ because we need those moments of bonding and those moments where you see that they care about each other. There was plenty of sadness.”

Webley says it was a dream to discover the screenplay, which happened quite unconventionally as he was working on something else with Machoian.

“I asked Robert if he had another thing that I hadn't read of his and this was a movie that he thought was maybe going to be his first movie 10-plus years prior but never got it going. Anyway, he gave it to me and I was like, ‘Why are we writing this other script? This is ready to go’. I read it as a reading sample at first, so I was really not projecting my own kind of direction upon it, I was just reading it as an audience and not expecting that I would find this to be the script that we would go make. So I had a very unique experience.

I remember after reading it, I just said to my producer, ‘Wow, this is going to make an incredible film. Whoever makes this movie is going to make a great little movie out of this’. And he said, ‘Yeah, you are. This should be your first movie’.

Cole Webley: 'I wanted the film to feel more like a photo book of a photographer travelling through the West than a cinematographer with a capital C' Photo: Greenwich Entertainment

“And so, then I went back and I got to experience the movie as a director, and really understand why I wanted to make this project and it’s all those reasons that we've kind of discussed about fatherhood, about familial drama about the the potency of the emotion of the story, but I also love that it was just a very simple A to B story. You get in the car, you go somewhere, you have an experience. And it was anchored entirely around the performance and the believability of this family and I really loved that. I felt like that is what I wanted to do. I wanted to get into the nuance of these singular characters and just travel with them. And who doesn't want to make a road trip movie if you grew up on American indie cinema? What a lucky opportunity to have found this script. I read it in March of that year and we were shooting in September.”

Magaro has made these sorts of sympathetic, softer and nuanced performances a staple of his career, from Cookie in Reichardt’s First Cow through to sympathetic husband Arthur in Celine Song’s Past Lives and his career seems to have picked up momentum recently.

Omaha poster

“I guess that's the stuff I respond to. That's the performances that I like. Maybe I just have one of those faces. I don't know exactly the reason why but I'm happy to play these types of characters. There’s a ton of things that I’d like to have a go at. That’s the fun of this, that you get to try all kinds of different stuff, if you’re lucky. Momentum? I don’t know. I'm still kind of scrapping along here and just climbing a bit. I think there's plenty of people who haven't seen my work. It's mainly cinephiles, which I love, the people who keep this thing going so that's good.

“I've been doing it for a long time. It's been 20 years and like anything, I think if you have a good reputation and you do decent work, there's more opportunities just because the world starts to get smaller and smaller – and certainly the indie world is very small. But it still feels like it's a slog or a struggle in some ways, it's still being an artist. I still have to worry about paying my mortgage… all that kind of stuff.

“What's really wonderful is that this script was unexpected. And it was a no-brainer. It came out of the blue, like Cole said, a couple friends said, ‘Hey, give it a shot’. But the thing is even if they didn't say that, I would have been blown away by this script and wanted to do it.

“I like to be surprised and I think that's why I like to continue to get scripts and continue to read things because you never know where that's going to come from.”

Omaha is released by Greenwich Entertainment in New York today with a national rollout across the US next month.