The sisters brothers
THe sIsTeRs BROTHeRs I Jacques Audiard digs his spurs into the cowboy movie, alongside Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly…
Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly and Riz Ahmed saddle up.
I’m like a horse – an unpredictable animal,” smiles Jacques Audiard. “I like to be surprised by things and by a subject that I find interesting.” From his Fingers remake The Beat That My Heart Skipped, starring Romain Duris, to Oscar-nominated prison movie A Prophet, and from unconventional love story Rust And Bone to his Cannes-winner Dheepan, the French auteur certainly lives up to this capricious quality.
Continuing this run is The Sisters Brothers, an eccentric outsider western that marks Audiard’s English-language debut. Adapted from Patrick deWitt’s 2011 novel, this unorthodox 1850-set gold rush tale sees John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix play Eli and Charlie Sisters, sibling assassins who work for an Oregon mobster named the
Commodore (Rutger Hauer). “It was a real page-turner and it just jumped out as a film,” says Reilly, who pays tribute to his wife Alison Dickey for urging him to read deWitt’s book before it was published.
They optioned it – wisely, as the book was then shortlisted for the Man Booker prize – then spent the next six years developing it, with Reilly on board as producer for the first time in his long career.
The result couldn’t be better timed, with the western – a hardy perennial if ever there was one – enjoying a cultural bloom. From Scott Cooper’s Hostiles and the Coens’ The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs to videogame of the moment Red Dead Redemption 2, it’s currently cool to be a cowboy. But, typically, Audiard doesn’t see his film that way. “Maybe it’s a western for people who don’t like westerns,” he shrugs.
While there is plenty of bloodshed, it’s not the sole driving force of the
film. “That was one of the main things we wanted to avoid,” says Reilly. “There’s no reason to make another bang-bang shoot-’em-up cowboy movie. There are so many already, so many great ones.” He cites The Wild Bunch’s Sam Peckinpah, whom he loved as a kid for his “black and white” characters, but believes Audiard’s movie is different. “This is a western for a more evolved mentality.”
As the plot unfolds, the siblings are instructed to head to San Francisco to meet with John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), a scout for the Commodore who should be delivering the prize: a gold prospector – Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed) – who ran out on a debt. But when Morris befriends Warm, who has conjured a liquid formula to illuminate nuggets of gold in water, they decide to go into business together.
Co-writer Thomas Bidegain, Audiard’s collaborator on all his films since 2009’s A Prophet, estimates that the “most influential” element was not other westerns, but the fairytale. “There was the gold, a formula, something magical,” he says. It’s why the main reference they had for the film – “maybe all the films we’ve made together” – is 1955’s Depression-era thriller The Night Of The Hunter, starring the iconic Robert Mitchum.
The writer notes The Sisters Brothers broaches the rarely explored “sentimental western”, while Reilly talks about the “emotional availability” of the characters. These are men without women, lonely and left stultified in each other’s company. Yet don’t expect hugs on the trail. One scene in which a spider (CG, thankfully) crawls into Eli’s mouth and bites him shows just how harsh life in the Great Outdoors can be.
When it came to casting, there was only one choice to play Reilly’s brother. “I think Joaquin is the greatest actor working now, and of course you want to work with the best,” says Reilly. “I knew it would have to be a very close relationship, someone that I had a good bond with.” Audiard was immediately sold on the idea of Phoenix. “Joaquin doesn’t play a character; he plays with the character,” he tells Teasers.
If Phoenix might be an obvious choice, selecting British star Riz Ahmed to play Warm was more radical. It was his turn in HBO limited series The Night Of that convinced Audiard. “I didn’t really know Riz, but I was very impressed,” he says. His casting immediately changed perceptions of the character. “He is like a messiah – he has a Christic approach to that role, and that makes it very different.”
While Audiard’s English is limited – today, Bidegain is his interpreter – his on-set female translator lent the film a different dimension. “Men going head-to-head with each other is different than men speaking to each other by way of a woman,” notes Reilly. “There were a lot of women behind the camera and I could immediately see it was an important thing for Jacques that we have that. We didn’t want to just have a sausage party!”
Shot in Spain, France and Romania, it was a physically grueling shoot – not least for Riley. Horse riding “was an act of blind faith”, he chuckles. “There are a couple of moments where I almost died on that horse! But every day I would hug the horse and say, ‘Thank you for keeping me safe!’ I would give it an apple and a kiss and say, ‘Until next time.’ I knew how important my relationship with that horse was.”
With Audiard winning Best Director for the film at the Venice Film Festival in September 2018, where it premiered, The Sisters Brothers now comes trotting into UK cinemas. Will audiences relate to a story set almost 200 years ago? Audiard thinks so. “Today,” he says, “it asks the question of, ‘What do we do with all that violence, inherited from our past? What kind of utopia can we still find?’” Time to saddle up… JM
ETA | 5 APRIL / THE SISTERS BROTHERS OPENS IN SPRINg.
‘Joaquin is thE grEatEst, and you want to work with thE bEst’ John C. Reilly