Interview: Writer/Director John Maclean of ‘Slow West’

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CHICAGO – Now playing at Chicago’s Music Box Theater and on VOD (but best seen on the largest screen possible), “Slow West,” is a tight genre journey pic that invigorates the western while confirming that its territory remains open, despite the many who have passed through. It’s a progressive western; recognizable for Fassbender’s Clint Eastwood impression, but offering something new with its ideas of gender and violence. Not for nothing, it also features “The Place Beyond the Pines” actor Ben Mendelsohn in a coat that will change the way you look at fashion.

The story follows a young man (Kodi Smit-McPhee), as he ventures across 19th century America in search of a woman (Caren Pistorius) that he loves. He receives some help from independent traveler Silas (Fassbender), while encountering unpredictable forces of nature (played by Mendelsohn) and brutal inhumanity.

Before his debut film, director John Maclean was in the Scottish musical group The Beta Band, which then led him working behind the camera for two shorts, “Man on a Motorcycle” (2009) and “Pitch Black Heist” (2011). A rare bragging right for any starting director, both of those shorts starred Michael Fassbender. The latter is particularly clever - and available on YouTube - featuring Fassbender and Liam Cunningham as two men chit-chatting while practicing what the title promises, all set within a great sense of cool.

HollywoodChicago.com talked with MacLean over an international phoner while “Slow West” was being shown at this month’s Chicago Critics Film Festival.

HollywoodChicago.com: What knowledge did you have of the genre before venturing into what eventually became ‘Slow West’?

John Maclean: I had seen some of the classic westerns, “The Good Bad and the Ugly,” “Once Upon a Time in the West,” and then in preparation while writing the script I really went back watched every western from early John Ford to “Shane” to “High Noon” and then “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” and it was a really education, actually. Watching them all together and realizing that every western is really different from each other.

HollywoodChicago.com: Were you watching more modern takes on the western in general, like “The Proposition,” or “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”?

Maclean: I had seen them anyway, I was aware of those films. I felt when approaching this western it was a case to watch all these westerns so that I’ve got the knowledge. But in general I was really watching more Japanese and Russian cinema, and other films to get an example of a European world in this western landscape.

’Slow West’
Photo credit: A24

HollywoodChicago.com Without ruining anything about the action in the movie, there is nonetheless a curious recount of all the carnage at the very end of the movie. What inspired this presentation on violence?

Maclean: I think in the script, it started writing itself in a way, and it became more or less about life in the west. It felt like it was about desperation, and people on the brink, and that people had traveled a long way. As for the violence, I wanted to comment on these weapons that Americans use, and I wanted the violence to be in short bursts, and to not do slow-motion glorifying, style violence. That it’d be quick.

HollywoodChicago.com: ‘Slow West’ stands on its own as a western with that coloring scheme. What inspired that artistic choice?

Maclean: Sam Peckinpah films. You watch them, like ‘The Wild Bunch,’ and you see how the sky is, that it has this slightly saturated color when it’s usually quite bright. We wanted the costumes to do something different there. It was very conscious to try and make it brighter, and then a lot of desaturating, like from the dark kind of old photographs.

HollywoodChicago.com: The secret of this film is that it was shot in New Zealand. Did you consider shooting it in its set location of Colorado?

Maclean: In preparation for [‘Slow West’], I went and spent time on a ranch in Colorado, and it felt like the landscape was similar to that i imagined it to be for New Zealand. forest green and colorado.

HollywoodChicago.com: What about working so closely with Fassbender has influenced you as a director?

Maclean: I think it’s that you really want it to be great. He really appreciates it from there, the dialogue to be absolutely great and the characters to be great. It really helped in the writing stage to push myself. He’s asking all the questions and he understands, and we’ll talk about stuff with his character. It’s great to have on set to have that confidence from an actor. So I just sit back and watch, really.

By NICK ALLEN Editor & Staff Writer HollywoodChicago.com [email protected]