AT HOME ON THE RANGE
Walter Hill returns to his beloved genre with western
Years ago, director Walter Hill read about a Danish cowboy named Chris Madsen.
His life seemed to unfold like a movie. He had fought in the Dano-prussian War in the 1860s and spent time serving in the French Foreign Legion. He eventually sailed to America, headed west and served as a scout for the American army before becoming a lawman and a bounty hunter.
“He had a whole series of adventures and a very enviable record as a lawman and bounty man,” Hill says. “So I thought somebody like that would be a good departure point to do a western because you're always looking to get into them a little different and not do the same thing. So I started writing a narrative.”
He called his friend, Oscar winner Christoph Waltz, and asked if he would be interested in reading what would eventually become the screenplay for Dead for A Dollar. Within a few days, the actor called back and said “When do we start?”
Hill had also written a part for Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe, who he had wanted to work with again after directing the American actor in one of his early roles in the 1984 neo-noir musical Streets of Fire. On the surface, it all sounds deceptively smooth and straightforward. After all, why should Hill have any trouble making a western? The genre is virtually a part of his DNA. His early days in Hollywood found him working as a production assistant on classic TV westerns such as Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Big Valley and Wild Wild West in the 1960s. When he began directing his own films, he often revisited the genre. His third film was 1980's The Long Riders, which retold the story of Jesse and Frank James and the James-younger gang of outlaws and gave new life to the genre. He also made 1995's Wild Bill with Jeff Bridges and the 2006 TV movie Broken Trail, which became an early hit for AMC.
At one time, Hill even famously told a reporter “Every film I've done has been a western.”
Nevertheless, a western is apparently a hard sell these days, even with Hill at the helm and a cast that includes not only Waltz and Dafoe, but Benjamin Bratt, Rachel Brosnahan from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Grey Anatomy's Brandon Scott.
In his director's notes for the film, Hill says “getting it financed was a miracle.” It was shot on a “very low budget” in New Mexico over 25 days with Canadian financing that mostly came from Alberta, Hill says. The original plan was to film in Alberta as well, which is where the director shot Broken Trail, but too many of the sets and locations they wanted were spoken for last summer. The timing was tight because many cast members had other commitments.
The silver lining is that Hill, who turned 80 this year, was able to make the film he wanted without any interference despite the budget constraints. Of course, Hill has always worked that way, whether it be on his 1979 gang-warfare cult classic The Warriors or 48 Hrs. (1982), which remains his biggest box office success.
“I don't know how to say this, but they don't mess with me on the set,” Hill says. “I shoot it the way I want to shoot it and if someone tries to tell me different, I'll go home. There is no arguing.”
For film buffs, news that Hill was back behind the camera is cause for celebration. Dead for A Dollar premièred at the Venice International Film Festival, where Hill was also awarded the Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award alongside Ridley Scott, and had its Canadian première at the Calgary International Film Festival earlier this month.
This is his first movie since the 2016 action-thriller The Assignment. It doesn't take long into the film to sense that an old master is back in his wheelhouse, deftly mixing Old West hallmarks, strong performances and exciting action sequences.
While the adventures of Chris Madsen may have inspired Dead for A Dollar, the film is fiction. So is Max Borlund, the efficient and principled bounty hunter of fuzzy European descent played by Waltz. He is enlisted to track down the wife (Brosnahan) of a wealthy businessman (played by Hamish Linklater), who claims she has been kidnapped by a Black soldier named Elijah (Scott) and taken to Mexico. When Borlund and his new partner, another Buffalo Soldier named Alonzo (Warren Burke), discover the wife has left voluntarily and is escaping an abusive marriage, they must decide what course of action to take. Complicating things is a ruthless Mexican crime lord, Tiberio Vargas (Bratt), and Borlund's old enemy, Joe Cribbens (Dafoe), who are both closing in and primed for a showdown.
While there are plenty of western touchstones, Hill said he also wanted to mix in some commentary about race and gender.
“Originally, I had two goals: I wanted to honour the values and tropes, shall we say, of the traditional western,” Hill says. “But I also wanted to interject a few more modern issues into the narrative. I thought I wanted race and feminism to come into play. But you have to be able to do it within the historical context. If you let the dialogue surrounding the issues be too contemporary, it will play as pandering to the audience. You have to keep it within the time frame. But there were proto-feminism and proto-race issues then. Within the historical context, I tried to delineate some of that.”
Hill dedicates the film to Budd Boetticher, a filmmaker whom Hill admired and who specialized in low-budget westerns from the 1950s. Hill and his brother began going to B-movie westerns every weekend at a young age growing up in Southern California.
“I've just always been very moved by westerns,” Hill says. “As I hopefully got a little more sophisticated about the whole thing, I realized what I liked was, ideally anyway, their elegant simplicity, or seeming simplicity I should say, that would mask very deep issues: Issues of ethics and morality that could play out at a very primal level because there was no recourse to your normal civil authority so they had to work things about for themselves. I liked that.”