Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Words by JANE CROWTHER
The team behind a period comedy-thriller rendez-vous with Greg Williams during the premiere of the film in London.
Martin McDonagh aces exploring male friendship, and his latest look with Wild Horse Nine focuses on two veteran CIA agents working in 1973 Chile; Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell). The duo take a vacation from meddling in politics to visit Rapa Nui but both have secret agendas apart from taking snaps of the ‘big heads’. A movie that Rockwell describes as ‘about two white male idiots over the age of 50 who go to Easter Island to have one last hurrah and hijinks ensue.’ The film was a hit out of Venice Film Festival and now makes landfall in cinemas across the globe, with Greg Williams catching McDonagh and his cast at The Corinthia Hotel during the London premiere.
‘I thought it would be interesting to deal with a person’s guilt and attitude toward what he’s done,’ McDonagh says of the project, which digs into the past sins of both men and the moral choices they have to make. Two CIA spooks clearly have plenty of red in their ledgers, but also have a deep friendship and loyalty to each other. ‘The love between these two men, that’s the heart of the story.’ And, as expected from a McDonagh project, there’s also a lot of swearing and jet-black comedy. ‘It’s very funny – unusually darkly funny,’ Malkovich says. ‘It reminds me of life.’
Inspired by a combination of a trip to Rapa Nui and the song ‘Washington Bullets’ by the Clash, McDonagh combined the politics of ’70s Chile and American intervention, with the beauty of a remote island to create a screenplay that required two incredible actors. ‘John’s often done dangerous, scary kinds of guys,’ McDonagh says of the actor. ‘But his dexterity with the humour in the story and the sadness was just amazing. He makes a guy likable who has done some pretty awful things.’ The idea of playing Chris was intriguing to Malkovich; ‘He has such a history. He’s done a lot of things that are quite questionable and he wrestles with questions of conscience and questions of guilt, and what has he done with his life, and in the service of what.’
Rockwell has worked with McDonagh on Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and McDonagh felt he was ‘the perfect tennis partner for John’. ‘Lee’s an interesting character. He’s kind of a straight man to some extent, but then there’s a twist to him,’ Rockwell teases. The two men are managed (with exasperation) by CIA boss MJ, played by Steve Buscemi. ‘He tries to be the friendly boss, but sometimes that only goes so far, and then he has to put his foot down and be the disciplinarian, a little bit of a hard ass,’ says Buscemi. ‘I liked that.’
Mariana di Girolamo also joined the cast as a young woman also visiting the island. ‘Wild Horse Nine, for me, is a movie about friendship and redemption,” she says. ‘It’s also about compassion, memory, life and the absence of it. That’s the thing about Martin’s movies. They’re not binary. There’s not something good or bad. There’s a lot of gray area, and you can feel compassion for a character like this CIA agent. This is the first time someone has tried to tell this story this way. We always see political movies about coups in Latin America, Chile or Argentina. But this is very unique.’
The team were only the second film crew to lens on the island (after 1994’s Rapa Nui) and the lack of filming infrastructure there was a challenge to production with all equipment being shipped into the UNESCO World Heritage site from Chile. ‘The island had to be a character,’ says McDonagh. ‘And we also had to use the Moai perfectly. We made sure scenes were almost equally about them as they were about the characters.’ And, yes, the wild horses that run throughout the action are a real aspect of visiting Rapa Nui. The result is a film that is now firmly in the awards conversation and likely to inspire audiences to travel to South America. Just perhaps not in the bloody, profanity-laden way that Chris and Lee do it…
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Wild Horse Nine is in cinemas now
Read our review here
