First-time feature director John Maclean takes on western archetype and the core ideals of the American ethos in Slow West, his Sundance-winning feature starring Michael Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee
By Katherine Monk
It’s a genre marked by star-shaped badges and John Wayne’s lanky swagger, an optimistic ode to masculine heroes and horses. Yet, for all the fanatical affection lathered on westerns as a fundamental part of the American identity, historically speaking, most westerns are horse manure.
It’s a point John Maclean isn’t all that eager to assert right off the top, given he’s a Scotsman and his debut feature, Slow West, takes the viewer straight back to the open prairie and the romantic vistas revealed in early John Ford movies.
“Being Scottish, and tackling such a sacred American genre certainly crossed my mind the first time I watched it with an audience in the U.S.,” says Maclean, shortly after the film’s world premiere at the Sundance film festival, where it picked up the Grand Jury Prize in the world dramatic competition.
“Fortunately, I spoke to this guy afterward and he was a huge fan of the genre, and he said he thought we did it justice.”
And in many ways, justice – as a concept – is where westerns rest: Either civilization is redeemed through frontier punishment and the long arm of the law, or it surrenders to the chaos of the natural world as represented by the pristine wilderness and its First Nation inhabitants.
The traditional western subscribes to the former. The revisionist western splatters the latter in your face, usually with little red droplets of fake blood.
Slow West clearly falls on the revisionist side of the split-rail fence as it stars Michael Fassbender as Silas Selleck, a seasoned frontiersman, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Jay Cavendish, a member of the royal family in search of his true love in the new world.
“The genre has changed throughout history,” says Maclean. “I think it’s always reflected politics in some way, and has always contained semi-contemporary references, starting in the early 1930s and throughout the 1950s and 60s. But it’s always contained the myth of the west, the cowboy hats and guns and horses. So I drew on that combination of elements, the myth and the real history, on a revisionist level.”
Being Scottish helped, says Maclean, a veteran soundtrack composer who worked on High Fidelity and one of the best Canadian films of all time, Michael Dowse’s It’s All Gone Pete Tong.
“Because I saw this as a European take on the western, through people migrating there, it didn’t really feel foreign to me. People from all over the world went to America to settle the frontier. You didn’t always hear American accents,” says Maclean.
“The America that we see in the traditional western didn’t really exist. I wanted to steer clear of that romanticism. But I was interested in tackling the fairy tale element of it all – which gives it this magic realism, dreamlike quality,”
“The America that we see in the traditional western didn’t really exist. I wanted to steer clear of that romanticism. But I was interested in tackling the fairy tale element of it all – which gives it this magic realism, dreamlike quality,” says Maclean.
Smit-McPhee says it was the different tone of Maclean’s script, and the fully rounded character of Jay Cavendish that proved the biggest attractions.
“I wasn’t thinking of the western aspect at all,” says Smit-McPhee, an Australian-born actor who was most recently seen in the Vancouver-spun Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
“I really understood Jay. I connected to him on many levels… mostly in the way he talks about the universe. The books he quotes, and the way he looks at the world,” says Smit-McPhee.
“But also his dream-like quality of how he sees life. And it’s because he hasn’t grown-up. He hasn’t seen past the façade, or beyond the veil, of what the world really is. And so he feels this love that pulls him halfway around the globe. He’s such a pure entity, and his quest ends in a way you don’t expect, which I loved.”
Maclean says when he was writing the script, he wanted it to have a pure, singular, creative vision. “But I also wanted to say something about Native American culture, and I wanted to talk about violence, but never directly.”
The story is the most important thing, and if you’re following that, the rest will fall into place, says Maclean.
“You know, I avoided books written about the west in my research, and focused on the books that were written at the time our movie takes place: Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne… And for movies, I watched the early John Ford movies from the 1930s, which, when you think about it, were really only 30 or 40 years after the fact, so they were much different from the McCarthy-era westerns of the ‘50s. I think they were much more authentic.”
The richest research resource was none other than Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books: “They are chock-full of great stuff and were a great inspiration,” says Maclean, who actually cast Caren Pistorius, a Melissa Gilbert lookalike, in the romantic lead.
“I see this as a story of an American family, and all the coincidences of how they came to be. And it’s funny, I was fortunate enough to meet Robert Redford, and he didn’t want to talk about westerns, he wanted to talk about his Scottish roots. Everyone came from somewhere else,” says Maclean.
“And that’s why the western is so fascinating to me: You can take people from one environment, and place them in another, and they change. The west was violent, and so what happens to this true gentleman when he’s in an altered context? He changes. And I thought that was beautiful,” says Smit-McPhee.
“You see this pure child, and the chiseling influence of his new, raw environment.”
On the other side, you see Michael Fassbender playing Selleck, the wily Irishman who – part Shane, part mercenary — can straddle both sides of the fence, but sometimes gets snagged on the barbed wire of morality.
“I love America, and I did not write this movie from a cynical view,” says Maclean. “The fact is, most societies are founded on bloodshed and corpses. The west was no different from any other colonial experience. You can try to live your own way, but in the end, you have to live the way society tells you to live – and commit to the world you are living in. And at the turn of the 20th century, the west was a very violent place.”
Smit-McPhee nods quietly. “Yet, you are also your universe. You are your consciousness. What’s outside is inside. What’s inside is outside, so it’s all about the choices, and the way you choose to live. Move through with love and passion, and it will carve your ending. You carve your judgment. The world is, quite literally, your oyster.”
Slow West is currently playing in select markets across North America, and hits home release in July.
@katherinemonk
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