My name is Cinqué Lee, and I wrote and directed the film Last Ride. The friendship I shared with two of my closest childhood friends when we were 12 years old inspired me to write this film, which predominantly takes place inside a cable car where three 12-year-old boys are stranded high above the ground in the dead of a Norwegian winter. But before the cable car, there was the tree.
My coming-of-age narrative initially began as an exasperating dead-end after I failed to locate two close childhood friends, who I'll call Daniel and Nicky, I haven’t seen since we were 12. When you're a kid, you think you'll be friends forever, but I've never been able to reconnect with these two, although I've tried hard to find them both. Years ago, we went through a lot together – my mother had just died, and I was running wild, not having the tools to process my grief. These two friends helped me through that period in ways I've only realized since I’ve become an adult. Looking back, I only now know how deep our bond was, and writing this film was my way of remembering my friends.
I started writing Last Ride because of how much I would think about Daniel and Nicky. At 12 years old, I left the school we attended and enrolled in a filmmaking course at an art school; for some reason or other, our paths have never again crossed after that. Not knowing whatever became of them is hard to wrap my head around, because my best friends as an adult were kids I met in first grade. We know everything about each other at this point, but often will ask each other, What the fuck happened to Daniel and Nicky?
One of my best friends said that the last time he saw Daniel was when they were walking out of the school, after being thrown out, tears streaming down his face. I was already going to a different school at that point, so I only heard this story later, as an adult. Even though I wasn't there, I can picture his face on that day, and it breaks my heart because I punched him in the face one time. He only cried because he was so embarrassed I’d punched him in front of the cool girls … He knew better than to talk about my mother, who had died, but he did it anyway, and I'll never know why.
I thought he was the toughest kid I ever knew. The first time I met him was at his hallway locker in school. His locker was wallpapered with pornography magazines. Like a full page of a woman's genitals spread out on display on his inside door. Kids would hang out in the hallway by his locker, waiting for him to come and open it up. He also lifted weights and had prominent veins in his arms and neck. And all of this at the tender age of 12. I thought I was a terror. He looked the part.
The main inspiration for my movies comes from an incident that happened when the three of us were visiting the farm Nicky’s single mother had taken us to in upstate New York. I don't know where Nicky’s mother was when we climbed a tall tree off the property, but the three of us ended up stuck in a tall tree into the night, unable to get down, out in the middle of nowhere. I was the last one to climb up, being afraid of heights, and I remember there were giant furry caterpillars falling on me, freaking me out. They were all in my hair, all over my shoulders, and the other two thought that was so funny.
I was pissed off for a good while, but it got dark, and I was a city boy and became scared of being out there in the pitch black. Nicky’s mother maybe thought we were safer on the farm by ourselves than running the streets of Brooklyn at all hours, but we were all panicked. It felt like the end of the world.
Nobody wanted to fall asleep because we knew if we did, we would fall out of the tree, so we talked all night about everything – our fears of abandonment, our futures, the girls we liked. We looked at the stars, connecting the white dots, pointing out dicks and tits, bonding through our shared uncertainty until the sun came up and we finally found the courage to climb down.
In Last Ride, I transformed that tree into a cable car. We first met in first grade, but by 13, we were already in separate schools and somehow drifted apart without a proper goodbye. The film is a reminder of how unprepared we are when forced into early maturity; for me, my mother's death at the time and the otherworldly pain of knowing things would be different from now on. At that painful time, I relied on those two friends, wherever they are now.
This film is a memory of that rare alignment of friendship. I look back in awe at that point in my life and the sacrifices my parents and friends made. It also connects to a promise made later in life as an adult to look after my friend Sean’s son, after Sean passed away. Recognizing the same grief in the young son, I shared with him the value of friendships and how he should avoid letting them fall through the cracks. So, hold on tight to your friends, if you can, because they are the support you need … for each other.
Featured image, showing Cinqué Lee during the making of Last Ride, by Antti Rastivo.
