When ex-Beta Band member John Maclean decided to make a feature after several music videos and two shorts starring Michael Fassbender (including the BAFTA-winning Pitch Black Heist in 2012), he dreamt up Slow West. Set in 1870 in Colorado but filmed in New Zealand, it stars Kodi Smit-McPhee as a young Scotsman crossing the West to find his lost love, alongside Fassbender as an inscrutable tough guy who decides to chaperone the boy and Ben Mendelsohn as a bounty hunter on their tail.
So why a Western? “I kind of thought that it would be a nice way to make something cheap and still look respectable budget-wise,” laughs Maclean. “And it felt like I could tell a story that was contained as well, which felt more manageable for a first film than shooting in a city. I didn’t really want to make a Western in towns or with lots of extras and people saying ‘Howdy ma’am’ and stuff. And then just thinking that I could do something different with the Western as far as coming at it from a European point of view, with European characters.”
Maclean wrote with Fassbender in mind as well as Mendelsohn, of whom he’d been a fan since Animal Kingdom. Finding an actor to play the sincere, idealistic Jay Cavendish was tougher until he came across Smit-McPhee.
“Kodi just seemed to be physically perfect and the kind of person who was able to travel across the world and at the same time appear quite fragile,” says Maclean. “And a lot of young actors spend too much time in the gym. They look very contemporary. It was the romanticism and classicism of Kodi that sold it.”
Shooting in NZ gave the film an unusual, Southern Hemisphere brightness, which suits its slightly unreal, fairytale-like quality. “Robbie [Ryan, director of photography] is a master of light and it’s something he was worried about – the flat light. Another journalist asked why we turned up all the colours and I had to say that that’s what we got when we shot, without grading, that was just the light. I’d given Robbie a lot of references; Sam Peckinpah films of the ’60s and ’70s, which do have that technicolour feel about them”.
But whatever its visual palette, Slow West is nothing like a Peckinpah film. It has a tone all its own, odd and idiosyncratic and often very funny. Yet it never comes off as empty quirk.
“I recoil at the word ‘quirk’, really,” says Maclean. “I think in the script the lines never felt like jokes, they just felt like ridiculous situations, and then in the shoot we just really played it straight. “None of the characters ever thinks they’re funny.”
A sense of the ridiculous and the poetic – and the possibility of both existing simultaneously – pervades the film. Late in the piece, Jay and Fassbender’s taciturn cowboy recite to each other from horseback. “The idea was that Jay’s always been almost pretentiously poetic, and Michael’s character has always been very unpretentiously non-poetic,” laughs Maclean. “And that was the point where he let his guard down, and showed that he was more intelligent than he was letting on, he wasn’t a brute, and he did have poetry in him. One quotes from Ambrose Bierce and the other from Nathaniel Hawthorne, writers of the time. They’re both referring to ghostly things.”
Slow West is part of Sydney Film Festival‘sSpecial Presentations at the State Theatre on Thursday June 4 and Friday June 5.Also showing at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre on Friday June 5 and Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace Cremorne on Monday June 8
