SLOW WEST written and directed by John Maclean, with Kodi Smit-McPhee, Michael Fassbender, Caren Pistorius and Ben Mendelsohn. A Soda Pictures release. 84 minutes. Opens Friday (June 12). For venues and times, see Movies.
Having directed Michael Fassbender as a luckless criminal in the 2012 short film Pitch Black Heist, John Maclean knew he wanted to do something a little different with the actor in a feature.
The result is the strange, beautiful Slow West, in which Fassbender plays Silas, a morally murky gunslinger helping a young Scotsman (Kodi Smit-McPhee) find the woman he loves in 1870s America.
“I sort of had a few basic images,” explains Maclean, who made his name as a member of the Beta Band before shifting into filmmaking.
“I had an image of a cowboy standing in a cornfield maybe I’d read something or seen a picture, I can’t quite remember any more. And then I had a few feelings about that almost Merchant/Ivory kind of European poshness, which was happening at the same time as the Wild West, and linking the two eras.”
The clash of Smit-McPhee’s proper, book-smart tenderfoot and Fassbender’s rough-hewn, pragmatic outlaw gives the movie’s first half a lightly comic charge, as well as giving Maclean the chance to feature Fassbender in a properly iconic cowboy role.
“When we shot the first few scenes, I never shot any close-ups of Michael at all,” Maclean says. “It’s sort of all from a distance. That was deliberate, so I wouldn’t even have the choice in the edit to come in close. You’re sort of drawn toward him throughout the film.”
Casting Fassbender also accidentally led the production to find a perfect location.
“You’re trying to make a film and you’re looking at Michael Fassbender’s incredibly busy schedule,” he laughs. “I had to find a place where I could shoot November-December, really. That was our window. It was Colorado in the winter or New Zealand in the summer.”
Maclean decided on New Zealand because he was wowed by the scenery. And unlike other recent westerns that use digital trickery to insert American landmarks into foreign locations, Maclean just used good old-fashioned camera placement.
“On occasion we’d be filming into, like, a silver birch forest,” he says, “something really scrubby and bush. And behind us were these vast lakes and mountains, this amazing scenery. But we tried, a lot of the time, not to get caught up with shooting scenery that wasn’t part of the scripted story.”
To make the locations feel more genuine, Maclean drew on extensive research.
“I actually read a lot that was written at the time, rather than reading books [written] now about then,” he says. “Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain – and [Laura Ingalls Wilder’s] Little House On The Prairie, which was one of the most interesting. Just having a different sense of the West.
“There’s the day-to-day survival, and you sort of start to conjure a land that’s vast and desolate, but at the same time populated. People would bump into each other, because there was only a certain amount of trails.”
John Maclean on how he came up with the film’s world:
Maclean on why Slow West clocks in at just 84 minutes:
Maclean on whether the transition from making music to making movies was difficult:
Don’t miss our review of Slow West here.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
