The American West was once an unlikely destination and “office” for this accomplished director, but then Yellowstone came a-callin’.
Director Christina Voros is calling from the Montana location for Yellowstone, where she’s riding herd on an episode in the “final cycle” of executive producer Taylor Sheridan’s phenomenally popular neo-western series.
“I guess they’re calling it Season 5B,” she says, referencing the extended hiatus between January 2023, when the last new episode aired on Paramount Network, and November 2024, when the show is expected to return. “We started shooting middle of May, so we’re in the thick of it up here. And we’ve had everything from snow to 85 degrees in the last three weeks, so it is a true Montana spring.”
This is by no means Voros’ first rodeo. Indeed, she has been active in the Taylor Sheridan universe for the better part of six years, graduating from camera operator to cinematographer to director while working on Yellowstone, 1883, and, most recently, Lawmen: Bass Reeves. She earned an Emmy Award nomination in the Outstanding Cinematography category for the pivotal “Lightning Golden Hair” episode of 1883. And now, in mid-June, she’s helping draw the curtain down on the flagship Sheridan series — a year and a half after she directed the climactic episode, “A Knife and No Coin,” of Season 5A.
“It’s strange,” Voros says. “The way this show has evolved from the first season to now has been a marvelous surprise for all of us, I think. When we started Season 1, I don’t think anyone had any idea the phenom that this show would become. We were just a bunch of creative people, really excited to be able to tell this spectacular story in this spectacular place with an unbelievable cast, and an unbelievable writer and leader in Taylor. And what’s happened over the years is, the team has really become a family. There are a lot of people on the show this season who’ve been with us since day one.”
Voros’ directing work on Taylor Sheridan shows has challenged her in myriad ways, from the family drama of the flagship Yellowstone show to the period scenery of Lawmen: Bass Reeves.
(Unfortunately, Kevin Costner won’t be one of those people: He announced his permanent departure from Yellowstone not long after the interview for this article took place.)
Are Voros and everyone else braving the Montana weather changes feeling enormous pressure to provide a satisfying conclusion to the Yellowstone saga?
“I think some of what might in any other situation be perceived as a weight or obligation is mitigated by the fact that we’ve all been doing this together for a really long time,” Voros says. “And the reason we keep coming back to do it is because we love it, and we love each other, and we love the world and the characters that Taylor has written. And we’ve really become a big creative family that gets back together every six months or eight months or a year to keep doing the same thing.
“I think the only pressure that feels different this year is, the level of secrecy around the material adds a layer of work for everyone. There aren’t scripts in the same way that we are used to. Everything’s redacted. There are code words for things. There’s an additional layer of complexity to just getting the work done. But I don’t personally feel any different. I’ve always felt a tremendous amount of responsibility to the work — and I think everyone else on the crew has, too. Because I think we’ve always felt those expectations to deliver for the audience. And for Taylor.”
Actually, wrapping up a classic TV series is far from the most daunting challenge Voros has faced in Sheridan world. Consider: For the premiere episode of Lawmen: Bass Reeves, she had to recreate Civil War battle scenes. (“Every stuntman I had ever worked with in my entire career was on the third page of the call sheet.) And for that “Lightning Golden Hair” episode of 1883 — well, there were tornadoes.
“Look, I saw Twister,” Voros says, “but I didn’t know how you make a tornado when you’ve got 25 wagons pulled by a team. There was just so much that not only I’d never done, but I had not seen done before. And so there was a tremendous amount of pressure to learn things really, really fast to be able to execute them in a way that that story deserved.”
A Director’s Journey
Christina Alexandra Voros, the child of Hungarian immigrants who fled their homeland during the 1956 Revolution, was raised in Boston. “But I always had family in New York City,” she says, “because that’s where most of their relatives stayed when they got to the States. So, I bounced around, and was a predominantly East Coast kid, and stayed in Boston for a couple of years after college and managed restaurants.”
She ultimately enrolled in NYU Film School, where she studied under Spike Lee and other notables, and started on a career path that included such highlights as directing The Ladies (2007), an award-winning documentary short about elderly Hungarian emigres in New York, and serving as cinematographer for As I Lay Dying (2013), James Franco’s adaptation of the William Faulkner novel, on location in Mississippi. That’s where she met her future husband, Jason Owen, a real-life cowboy and team roper who has worked as a wrangler and stuntman on films and TV dramas as diverse as No Country for Old Men, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Yellowstone, and Lawmen: Bass Reeves.
“I don’t think either of us thought the relationship had legs,” she says. “I mean, he was a cowboy from West Texas, and I was a hipster from the East Coast living in Brooklyn. That was 12 years ago, and we’ve been married since 2015. And I now live in a little truck stop town out in the desert of West Texas, and I make westerns for a living. So you never really know where life is going to take you.”
Christina Voros’ cinematography work on 1883 has earned her an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Cinematography.
From our October 2024 issue.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy of Paramount Network
