In Shana Feste’s Films, Gender-Flipping Cinema’s ‘Tradition of Celebrating Damaged Men’ Is Its Own Reward

Shana Feste knows her filmography might be a bit tough to pin down. Some directors like to stick to a certain genre. Not Feste. Some only like to work with certain stars. Not Feste. Others enter a franchise and never look back. Not Feste.

But over the course of nearly two decades behind the camera, Feste has carved out a particular sweet spot, regardless of the genre or the cast or the wider world her stories fit inside: She likes complicated women. Not unlikable women, but messy women, contradictory women, women who get things done their own way. It’s a signature unto itself.

“My filmmaking, my history, people have not really known what to do with me. I’m making a comedy, I’m making a horror film, I’m making a genre thriller,” Feste told IndieWire during a recent interview. “But I do find that they’re all starting to build into each other, especially the trajectory from ‘Country Strong’ to ‘Run Sweetheart Run’ to ‘Heartland.’ I’ve always been drawn to women who don’t behave correctly. I’ve always been interested in women who don’t grieve correctly, who mother incorrectly, who love incorrectly. I just want women to have the freedom to behave in this contradictory, destructive, funny, selfish way and be given the same freedom that male characters are given.”

Another shared characteristic between Feste’s complicated women: They may be messy or unexpected, but they tend to get shit done. In her new film “Heartland,” getting shit done is at the center of the story, as the Nashville-set drama follows Jessica Chastain as Misty Jones, a former country-singing superstar who left the business after her designation as the, ahem, “cunt of country” became too much to bear. She’s thrust back into that world after her niece, rising star Charlie Heart (Carter Faith), goes missing. Misty, being Misty, takes it upon herself to get to the bottom of an increasingly dark and twisted mystery, no matter what it takes.

“I am a mom of three, 51, and I’m like, ‘Let’s write about some women who get shit done,’” she said. “I find a lot of those women exist. I’m living in the South now that I see those women every day and am inspired by them. We have this long-established cinematic tradition of celebrating damaged men. But when women behave similarly, they could be labeled as hysterical or dramatic or that word, unlikable. I want to prove that wrong.”

For the (complicated, messy, extremely capable) character of Misty, Feste said, she initially tapped into her longtime love of film noir. She always gravitated toward the Humphrey Bogart types, she said, but wondered what might happen if they gave those sorts of roles to women. That also fed into the dark underbelly of the Nashville scene that the film interrogates, a perfectly noir-ish idea.

“It could have been any city, but specifically this dark underbelly had to do with the music world,” Feste said. “Sadly, it was a common experience for a lot of artists that I spoke with. It was an experience that I’ve experienced in our industry, and it was all too relevant. When we were making the movie, a lot of conversation around Diddy was happening. He had just been arrested, and things were coming into light. We thought, oh wow, this is such a topical moment. And I’m like, it’s always topical, sadly. Whether we’re Epstein, Diddy, Weinstein, this is always going to be in the world, sadly.”

Ross Lynch, Carter Faith, Shana Feste, Jessica Chastain, Garrett Hedlund, and Paul Sparks attend Netflix‘s ‘Heartland’ New York Special Screening at Metrograph on November 05, 2026 in New York CityGetty Images for Netflix

But Feste is also someone who loves this world and wants to celebrate what’s good and true about it. “Country Strong” was about making it — and maybe even making it again — even at great personal cost. “Heartland” just ratchets that sensibility up.

“I wanted to lean into the secrets and the dark corners and the underbelly, but I also will always celebrate the artistry and the storytelling of country music,” she said. “Misty says one line that really speaks so much to me about what the film is: ‘You don’t deserve country music.’ It takes a lot to deserve country music in my eyes. Country music is like the apex of storytelling. So to point out someone who doesn’t deserve country music, I mean, that’s a big insult for me.”

Feste started writing “Heartland” around four years ago, mostly because she was really missing the world of country music that framed her 2010 music drama “Country Strong.” “My father died about eight years ago, and I found myself listening to a lot of country music when he died,” she said. “In the years after he died, going back to the music that he loved, that he used to play for me in the car when we were driving on road trips, I realized that when you’re a writer, you don’t know quite why you write something until years later. And I realized, oh, I’m really missing my father.”

She was also eager to reteam with her “Country Strong” collaborators Jenno Topping and Randall Poster, two people who Feste said have believed in her the most over the course of her career. (Topping and Poster both produced “Heartland,” with Poster also serving as music supervisor, as he did on “Country Strong.”) “When I’m having my darkest days about, I don’t know, me and what I create and my career, knowing that they believe in me has always been such a huge lift,” Feste said. “So having them help me tell this story was just monumental. It was being with someone that you knew had your back the entire time.”

If “Heartland” sees Misty feeling ill at ease in the very spaces that used to celebrate her talent, Feste had the opposite experience. Six films into her directing career, she said “Heartland” let her approach her work in an entirely new way. And it felt good.

Jessica Chastain as Misty Jones in ‘Heartland’Khalid Mohtaseb/Netflix

“What was really valuable with this experience is that I felt completely comfortable saying, ‘I don’t know,’ and I don’t know if I’ve ever felt that way,” she said. “Certainly not with my first few films, feeling like as a woman, I had to know every answer from every head of department immediately. It was only working with this group of filmmakers, Jenno and Randy and [production designer] Naomi [Shohan], some of my heads of production, that I knew that they saw my vulnerability not as a weakness, but as a strength. I was able to say, ‘I don’t know, what do you think?’ That’s where a very new form of collaboration happened that I haven’t experienced in my career, and with Jessica as well.”

Casting Chastain was an easy call for Feste. She wanted someone who could sing and who was admired in this space, but Chastain’s way of working and approach to on-set life gave Feste more to work with than she could have dreamed.

“I always want my films, especially when we’re shooting a movie that takes place in Nashville, to feel authentic, and I knew Jessica already had a huge buy-in from this audience. The South, they love her from ‘George & Tammy,’” Feste said. “And Jessica can sing, and that is another qualifier. Whenever I’m making any kind of movie with music, I want the actors to be able to sing their own material. But I think most of all, Jessica is one of the biggest champions of other women that I’ve ever met.”

It was freeing for Feste to say “I don’t know,” but Chastain also made it clear that she was there to support Feste’s vision and leadership.

“There were certain times on set where it would get a little loud or kind of disorderly, and people would be talking and having opinions, and no matter what, she’d be like, ‘Shana, sorry, I couldn’t hear you,’ and it was like this just gentle reminder, ‘This is who is leading the ship right now for me,’” the filmmaker recalled. “It was done in the classiest, most polite way.”

That approach turned the collaboration into more of a partnership. When Chastain had an idea, Feste was eager to listen. Even a decade ago, she said, that might not have been so easy for her.

“If I had been the director that I was 10 years ago, it would’ve scared me to death, because Jessica is not afraid to come into a scene and say, ‘OK, wait, that might not be serving us. Let’s throw that idea out of the window. What if we did this?,’” Feste said. “As a director, I’m planning, and every shot is in my head, and I’ve done the work, and I’ve done the homework, and I’m the A student. And to be able to relinquish control and admit when my idea wasn’t the best idea and she’s coming in with a stronger idea because she is Jessica Chastain? She has done the work. She has made this character so rich. This wasn’t a scary experience. It was actually going to elevate the scene and make it work even better.”

Jessica Chastain as Misty Jones and Jennifer Nettles as Winnie Jo Lean in ‘Heartland’Tina Rowden/Netflix

It was always the plan for Feste’s stars to also sing their songs to add to the film’s deeper authenticity. “When I’m watching movies that feature performing artists, and there’s so much hype, and they’re playing this celebrated musical performer, and then they come on, and we hear them sing and we’re like, have they been re-voiced? It’s just kind of mediocre? You just kind of lose your authenticity. You lose the ownership of the movie,” she said.

Casting Jennifer Nettles was something of a no-brainer for Feste, and so was actually directing the country superstar. “I didn’t know how to direct someone how to move on stage. That is something that’s not in my repertoire of directing. I can direct someone talking about their divorce in a bedroom, but how to command a stage and move your body? That is something that she learned over 20 years of experience being a superstar,” she said. “Most of the time I said, ‘Just speak to the audience like you are at the Opry, like you’ve done a thousand times. Make it your own.’ She did so much heavy lifting for me.”

So too did Carter Faith. In early discussions about the five characters in the film who are musical artists, Feste said she and Poster were constantly trying to figure out who they would sound like in the real world. Was Misty an Emmylou Harris? A Miranda Lambert? And who was young rising star Charlie Heart? Was she a Taylor Swift type? Poster had an easy answer: She sounds like this actual rising star, Carter Faith. And when it became clear that Faith was able to and interested in auditioning for the role? Serendipity.

“She was like a breath of fresh air,” Feste said. “I remember asking her, ‘Carter, what do you think you have in common with Charlie?’ And she said, ‘Well, we both have boy names.’ My heart exploded. It was the most non-Hollywood endearing response. Then I heard her story of how she was eating red beans and rice, crashing on couches, calling all of these places on Lower Broadway just to get an audition to be the performer at 10:00 AM on a Monday morning. She is someone who really moved to Nashville the day she graduated from high school to make it. She was Charlie. So much of her experience was exactly what the character was going through. So it was only the question of, are you brave enough to access all that trauma of how you got here? And she was absolutely, she said yes, and she trusted me, and it makes me emotional thinking about it because that’s an incredible trust to have.”

Carter Faith as Charlie Heart in ‘Heartland’Tina Rowden/Netflix

Faith also wrote the lyrics to the song that plays at the end of the film, which Feste sees as “dialogue that I could never write.” All the songs in the film and on its soundtrack, including the ones Feste simply imagined as titles first, like “Texas Land,” or that her stars like John Hawkes wrote or that Poster commissioned, add to the film’s incredible authentic feeling and sound. “Working with musical performances in film, it is so additive because it just takes the storytelling to another level. It’s beyond the dialogue. It’s beyond physical blocking. It tells story in this just purely emotional, raw, beautiful way,” she said.

Next up: In true Feste fashion, she’s working on or thinking about a variety of other projects next, including the next chapter of the “Dirty Diana” story, which she first cooked up during lockdown, a TV series about a Southern family, and her “dream project,” which is about Texas bank robbers. Mostly, she said, “I really want to continue working in this space. I want to continue telling stories about messy, complicated, vulnerable Southern women. I think that’s my bread and butter.”

“Heartland” is now streaming on Netflix.