‘Motor City’ Team Unpacks the ‘Intoxicating’ Challenge of Making an Action Movie With Almost No Dialogue

In many ways, “Motor City” is a familiar addition to the action movie canon.

Set in 1970s Detroit, it follows an auto worker (Alan Ritchson) who is framed by a local gangster (Ben Foster) and sent to prison. When he is released years later, he sets out on a mission to exact revenge and reconnect with his former love (Shailene Woodley). Revenge, love, betrayal. These are all recognizable ingredients of genre storytelling, and “Motor City” makes full use of them.

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There’s just one catch: It does so with practically zero dialogue. The number of spoken lines in the film can, in fact, be counted on one hand. According to director Potsy Ponciroli (“Old Henry”), it was that combination of new and old, familiar and experimental, that made “Motor City” such a compelling project.

“That was the beauty of [screenwriter Chad St. John’s] script,” Ponciroli told Executive Awards Editor Steve Pond at TheWrap’s 2025 Toronto International Film Festival Studio. “This is a movie we’ve seen. You’ve seen the revenge story. You’ve seen the love triangle. You’ve seen those beats. Giving the audience at least that head start allowed us to really play with and deliver things in a sparse way. We don’t have to force-feed anything.”

For actors Woodley and Foster, the film’s extremely sparse approach to dialogue gave them the freedom and permission to craft each scene on set as if it were, as Woodley remarked, “wet clay.”

“It’s intoxicating,” the actress said of signing on to do a film with virtually no spoken lines. “There’s something really beautiful about the possibility of the unknown. That’s my favorite part of being an actor: Letting the moment inform what the moment needs to be, instead of coming in with a premeditated idea of what the moment will absolutely be. Potsy is brilliant and kind and generous with his collaborators, and gave us the space and time to really mold the wet clay.”

“When there’s a script with [spoken] words, you do go in with a more solid idea of, ‘These are the moments. These are the beats. These are the things we need to hit,’” Ponciroli added, echoing Woodley’s sentiments. “On this, I got to come in and just sit in it. It was a whole different process.”

Foster was similarly excited by the possibilities that the “Motor City” script presented, and even more so by the freedom Ponciroli allowed him, Woodley, Ritchson and their other co-stars on set. “Character is behavior. For me, a red pen is always exciting to have with a script,” he explained, noting that his approach to making a movie is far more open and freeform than when he is preparing for a Broadway play or stage production.

“In film, you want something a little bit more electric, to attack and just tangle,” Foster observed. “So we tangled, and Potsy encouraged that. It was joyful for us to just jam, like a musician.”

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