Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for the Dutton Ranch premiere.When Taylor Sheridan’s neo-Western drama Yellowstone wrapped up with its fifth and final season, the question immediately became: how would the story continue? It turns out that the answer was twofold, with separate spin-offs revolving around John Dutton’s (Kevin Costner) descendants. Even though the Yellowstone itself is no more, Kayce Dutton (Luke Grimes) is serving as a protector in Montana on the CBS procedural Marshals, while his sister Beth (Kelly Reilly) and her husband Rip (Cole Hauser) have migrated to their own series, Dutton Ranch. As the premiere’s opening sequence reveals, however, their fresh start is fleeting; a devastating fire rocks their ranch in Montana, ultimately forcing Rip and Beth’s move to South Texas and officially kicking off a new chapter for the couple far from anyone who knows the Dutton name.
Ahead of Dutton Ranch’s two-episode premiere, Collider had the opportunity to speak with some cast and crew about a few of the series’ earliest twists, including director and executive producer Christina Alexandra Voros, whose past Emmy-nominated work for the Duttonverse on shows like *Yellowstone *and ***1883 ***speaks for itself. Below, the director of Dutton Ranch’s first two episodes explains the decision to move Beth and Rip’s story to Texas, why the premiere’s opening fire needed to be “heartbreaking,” the process of working with livestock, and more.
COLLIDER: What fueled the decision to move these characters to Texas and put them in a place that’s very different from the Montana that Yellowstone fans are more used to at this point?
CHRISTINA ALEXANDRA VOROS: Dutton Ranch is starting a new chapter for Rip and Beth, and what was exciting about it for me was seeing them outside of a place that we had grown to know as part and parcel of who the Duttons are.
Yellowstone was about holding on to a legacy, and Dutton Ranch is about building a new one. So, moving the story to a completely different landscape, for me, it really felt like the quintessential heartbeat of what an American Western is, right? It’s always about a new frontier. And I think that seeing Beth and Rip navigate a space that is not in their blood, in their bones, in their history is really, really exciting as you’re creating a new chapter for two characters that have been so well established in the past.
Before that happens, there is the opening sequence in the premiere, which puts Rip and Beth in a place a lot of viewers won’t be expecting. It really forces them to rebuild — not just in a literal sense, but it also puts them in an interesting position heading into this new frontier that we’ve been talking about. How did you want to approach showcasing the scope of the fire’s devastation?
VOROS: We wanted it to be visceral. We wanted it to be heartbreaking. We wanted it to be the kind of thing that embodies the threat that it is to both their life, their home, their family, all of it. It was a feat of many, many talented individuals coming together.
We did a lot of it practically. Our special effects team did an incredible job, our animal team did an incredible job, our stunt team did an incredible job, and then our visual effects team helped build out the pieces of it that we couldn’t actually set on fire in real life. But the goal of it was to be a real sucker punch and to have an opportunity to make the audience feel the extraordinary loss that they both experience.
As much as the Yellowstone franchise has been about human characters, this show in particular feels like it has a lot of drama surrounding animals. In general, what was the experience like of working with all the livestock we see this season?
VOROS: There are a lot of animals. I am biased. My husband, Jason Owen, is our animal coordinator. He’s a cowboy, and he and his partner put together an unbelievable team of wranglers whose job is not only to teach our actors how to be comfortable and confident on horseback, but to really look the part and to really look like they have been doing it for as long as the characters need to have done it. Kelly [Reilly] and Cole [Hauser] are incredible horse people. They’ve been riding themselves for years.
We have a tremendous amount of animal work in this season. There are things you learn as a director that you can do, that you can’t do, that you need to have flexibility with. But also, we’re in tremendous hands with our animal coordinating team in terms of navigating, and especially for directors who joined us, who perhaps might not have done quite as much work with livestock, ways to get the story on screen that keep everyone safe [and] that pack the biggest punch visually.
‘Dutton Ranch’ premieres with its first two episodes May 15 on Paramount+.
Also, in the Yellowstone world, authenticity has always been so important. It’s very important to Taylor [Sheridan], getting things right, not just in terms of how a cowboy sits in a saddle, but what he’s wearing, how he puts his hat down. We actually made seatbacks in our video village that said “Cowboy Police” on them this season, and one of our wranglers would often be on set, even on days when we didn’t do animal work, to make sure there wasn’t an extra with his hat on backwards in the church, or that somebody didn’t have spurs on when they shouldn’t.
I think that authenticity is part of what has given so much depth to the storytelling we get to do. It’s very important to everyone that we’re getting it right. So you had the practical element of working with animals that don’t always take direction, but you also had the obligation to try to keep the world as realistic as possible.
You’ve worked on several of Taylor’s shows, but is there anything that feels special about getting to continue Beth and Rip’s story with Dutton Ranch?
VOROS: I felt so lucky to be asked to continue on with Kelly and Cole and Finn [Little] into this season. Yellowstone has been such a huge part of my life. I started as a B-camera operator on Season 1 and then became a DP and then a director and then a producer, so, so much of my evolution as an artist and as a storyteller has come from the experiences I have had in this world. I feel very, very lucky to be part of this next chapter with them.
The first two episodes of Dutton Ranch are now streaming on Paramount+.
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