Our state portrayed in movies, TV thanks to Taylor Sheridan

Wyoming has been the home for four years to the hottest young movie and TV director Taylor Sheridan. And his love for our state has been shown recently in his movies and on TV.
 If you liked the movie Wind River, it is expected you will love Yellowstone, the new TV series.  Both projects come from Sheridan, 48.
His new TV series stars Kevin Costner as the owner of the largest ranch in Wyoming, which borders both Yellowstone National Park and a neighboring Indian reservation. It will debut in 2018.
Shades of the Longmire TV series, I expect it will include lots of references to Wyoming places and names.
As near as I can tell, he lives near the Salt River in Star Valley. So why does this guy love Wyoming so much?
I read up on him through interviews with Variety, Rolling Stone, Dallas News and Detroit News and came up with the following:
While growing up in Texas, he was furious about his parents getting divorced, which saw his mother move to Wyoming. He was quoted in the Dallas News that he was a Texas kid and did not speak to his mother for five years. She begged him to come to Wyoming. “This place will change you,” his mother told him. He relented, and his mom was right. “It was true wilderness,” he says. “It was a place of solitude.”

Ultimately he spent part of his childhood here and grew to love the place.
Over the years, he became an actor and lived in Hollywood. After he became a father, he made big changes in his life.  He sold everything and moved to Texas where he wrote three scripts for the movies Sicario, Hell or High Water and Wind River.  The first two were smash hit movies. But he wanted to direct Wind River out of his respect for Native Americans.
He was quoted as saying: “The reservation is less then 100 miles from Jackson Hole.” Sheridan said the reservation’s county (Fremont) “is one of the poorest counties in the nation up against one of the richest counties.
Sheridan is quoted as saying he spent a lot of time with American Indians and counts many as his friends. He wanted his movie Wind River to be honest and meet their expectations.
“There’s no way to describe the reservation,” says Sheridan, who says he has had Shoshone and Arapaho friends and that he has spent quite a bit on time with them. “People won’t believe that it exists. They won’t believe a place with that much inequity exists in the United States, with that much exploitation. And yet, it’s a community that is fighting; they don’t give up.”
One magazine article said Sheridan part of his 20s on the Wind River Indian Reservation, finding the simplicity as appealing as he did the social challenges distressing. He felt the reservation to be a natural spot for a story about unsolved assault.
Because he is not an Indian himself, he felt internal pressure to get the portrayal correct. “I knew I had to be respectful with their culture,” he said. “I have Native American friends that I can turn to and say, ‘Hey man, give this a read. What do you think?’”
Sheridan is quoted as saying: “I didn’t know if I could make a good movie, but I knew I could make a respectful one.”
The movie is about a wildlife tracker (Jeremy Renner) and an FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) hunting down a killer in the snowy mountains of western Wyoming.  The former has stumbled across the frozen body of teenage girl from the Wind River Indian Reservation. One of Sheridan’s motives for making the movie is what he calls the large number of unsolved murders on Indian reservations that involve women.
My wife Nancy and I watched Wind River recently and found it to be compelling and an exciting movie to watch. The movie’s portrayal of the problems of solving reservation crimes is accurate. The snowy mountain landscapes looked familiar to those of us who have lived here a long time, especially in winter.  
Lately, Sheridan has been splitting his time between his Wyoming digs and Park City, where his new TV series is being filmed.
When in Wyoming, he says his favorite activity is his and his six-year old son’s quest to find the biggest garter snake by the Salt River near their home. He said the biggest one they have found, so far, is just three feet long.