SICARIO 2: SOLDADO
THE MAKERS OF CARTEL THRILLER SICARIO WERE CONVINCED IT WOULD FAIL. IT DIDN’T. NOW SEQUEL SICARIO 2: SOLDADO IS SET TO PUSH DEEP INTO EVEN BLEAKER TERRITORY — BRACE YOURSELF
Sorry, Spurs fans: this isn’t about Roberto Soldado’s winner against Everton in November 2014. It’s more hitman fun with Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin.
"There was no moment on Sicario
where I wanted to do this again,” says Josh Brolin, on the set of the sequel to Sicario.
It’s December 2016 and, for now, this film is called Soldado, Spanish for “soldier”, referring to Brolin’s CIA agent Matt. Later it will be retitled Sicario 2: Soldado, and later still, in the US at any rate, Sicario: Day Of The Soldado, but today it is simply, confidently Soldado.
The crew have been shooting in New Mexico, making the most of the region’s Native American reservations, including Laguna Pueblo, where we are today
— a gorgeous vista and home to, at least this evening, a mountain sunset Instagrammers would die for.
It is also freezing. Way below zero. Empire has been warned to bring “your warmest parka, gloves, hat, lined boots, etc”; we look like Kenny from South Park.
Brolin, wrapped in a chunky puffa jacket, welcomes us into his slightly warmer trailer. Minutes earlier, he was sticking out of a Humvee roof, furiously firing off rifle rounds during a violent desert ambush scene, but now he’s chilled as you like, vaping away as he explains why he thought Denis Villeneuve’s cartel thriller Sicario would be a disaster.
“When you do a Coen brothers movie,” he says by way of contrast, “everything is figured out beforehand. There are storyboards and all the
writing’s been figured out, and you rehearse. Sicario was different. Sicario was ripping stuff apart and looking at it. It was like playing Lego. It was like a sandpit. We were all like,
‘Is this cool?’ It was like dealing with abstract art, all the time.”
The pressure built, affecting everyone. Brolin would host parties at his house on the weekends, laying on tacos and margaritas by the pool. “And Denis would be in a corner like this,” the actor remembers, miming crawling into the fetal position, “saying, ‘I don’t know whether it’s working or not working.’ It just looked like fuckin’ one big depressive situation.” When they wrapped, Brolin and his co-star Benicio Del Toro looked at each other and said, “Well, that didn’t work.”
In fact, it worked very well, garnering rave reviews and making $85 million worldwide from a $30 million budget. “I’ve learned now that Denis is much smarter than I thought,” says Brolin. “He knew exactly what he needed in order to put stuff together, and allowed us to find it. So he would never express too much confidence because it would possibly make other people lazy.”
Based on Sons Of Anarchy actor Taylor Sheridan’s first screenplay, it lifted the lid on US undercover operatives tackling the drug war, led by Brolin’s no-shit-taking Matt and Del Toro’s ruthlessly efficient sicario (hitman) Alejandro. For the first two-thirds we rode along with FBI agent Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt), a moral compass appalled by the corruption, determined to stick to her guns. Then, though, the film about-turned, having Alejandro shoot Kate in her (bulletproof vest-protected) chest, then following him as he exacted a shocking eye-foreye revenge on the man who ordered the murder of Alejandro’s wife and daughter.
There were no winners and no losers. Villeneuve brought the requisite doom but made it beautiful, like a trippy, pulsating horror, blindsiding critics and audiences. For the sequel, though, Villeneuve was wrapped up in Blade Runner 2049,
cinematographer Roger Deakins gone with him too. So, how to re-bottle that lightning?
Despite the title,
sicario Alejandro is the heart of Soldado
(we’ll stick with that title here for brevity’s sake). There had to be more to the man who gave so little away, thought Sheridan and Villeneuve, who briefly discussed the character’s potential while Sicario was still shooting. Six months after Sicario
wrapped, studio Lionsgate asked Sheridan for a sequel outline, but he said he just wanted to write it freely, ending up with something substantially more vicious than the first. “Ah, shit. We’re in a lot of trouble,” they said, reports Sheridan, after reading it. But there was no backing down. Sheridan’s scripts are sacred; this sequel has integrity.
Soldado, set an indeterminate time after Sicario, begins with a horrific terrorist attack, and then shows us drug cartels have been smuggling terrorists across the border into the
US, enabling these atrocities. The Secretary Of Defense (Matthew Modine) tasks Brolin’s Matt with starting a war between cartels, hoping for the ensuing casualties to decrease the problem. To kick things off, Alejandro guns down a cartel lawyer in the street, and they then kidnap a cartel leader’s 15-year-old daughter, Isabela (Isabela Moner), with fingers immediately being pointed at a rival syndicate. When the Mexican government gets involved, though, all manner of bloody chaos erupts.
Hunting for a director, the producers landed on Italy’s Stefano Sollima, responsible for no-nonsense 2014 crime series Gomorrah and 2015 Mafia thriller
Suburra. “Both of those were incredible, striking crime stories,” says producer Erica Lee, citing Sollima’s “experience with action and drama and grittiness” as winning attributes.
“I love Sicario,” says Sollima. “It’s pretty close to my vision of storytelling, of moviemaking.” Sheridan had designed
Sicario to crush Hollywood perceptions of good guys over here and bad guys over there, the film chiefly a comment on the way America polices. Everybody’s dirty. Sollima makes sense to head up the follow-up: his first film, in 2012, focused on riot police and was called
ACAB: All Cops Are Bastards. Next was TV’S Gomorrah, which delved into the social germs of organised crime, no morally righteous characters in sight. His dreamlike 2015 thriller Suburra tackled political corruption and the criminal underworld, beginning with an underage escort dying of an overdose during a threesome with an MP. Again: no heroes here.
The closest thing Sicario had to a hero, Emily Blunt’s Kate, is not involved this time. Victim to Matt and Alejandro’s forcibly dirty dealings, broken and spent by the end of the first film, she was the only character who experienced
a substantial arc, and that arc, figured Sheridan, was done. “She was a sort of surrogate for the audience,” says Sollima. “An almost wholesome, moral point of view. What I loved about Soldado is that you don’t have any moral point of view.”
At Laguna Pueblo, Sollima is marshalling a massacre. Matt, Alejandro and the team are in a Humvee convoy, en route from Mexico to the border to deliver kidnapped girl Isabela (whom they’ve now supposedly rescued) to the Mexican army before hitting home soil. But they are ambushed — there are many stakes in this game. Empire trails the convoy in another Humvee, a little too close for comfort as we hurtle across the plain — people are getting shot at, including Jeffrey Donovan’s DEA agent Steve Forsing.
“I was nervous,” Donovan tells Empire later of the sequence, explaining that although his Humvee wasn’t being shot with real bullets, marbles barrelling at your windscreen from a pneumatic gun are no less disconcerting. “Hopefully that’s tangible on screen. You still cower.”
Everything here feels real. Stunt co-ordinator Doug Coleman is having a ball, particularly enjoying choreographing the ambush scenes. “We’re blowing up Humvees,” he says. “It’s not over-the-top stuff, it’s very realistic action. I’m creating the illusion of high risk. Yes, we’re gonna see ‘brutal’, on film. Is it actually brutal? No. But I have to create that appearance.”
For further accuracy, Coleman has got himself some inside information. “My brother-in-law’s on the border patrol, so I’ve been getting intel from him,” he says. “He’s my underground technical advisor for this project. I’m hearing all kinds of things that I probably shouldn’t discuss.” Okay.
Brolin has his own intel too, having investigated covert military activity over the years. “The greatest thing is going out and getting people drunk,” he says. “Because then they start revealing shit that they would never reveal. They start saying, ‘Do you really wanna know how it is?’ I went down to Quantico [in Virginia, home to the Marine Corps HQ and an FBI training academy] and spent a lot of time with those guys, first
lieutenants or whatever. And they were like, ‘What the public knows about what we do is maybe ten per cent accurate.’ I don’t know the inside of it, I just know as much as I heard. But then you really start to question what’s going on and how things get done. That’s why I like a story like this — what’s the subterranean of it all?”
Balancing out the enormous amount of testosterone on set is 15-year-old Isabela Moner. She says she was “scarred” by some sequences in Sicario, but loved the film and jumped at the chance to play her namesake in Soldado. Like everyone else, she did her research. “I read up on the Mexican government, and on people who have lived their lives running from them.
I read this book called Prayers For The Stolen, about these young girls who have to make themselves ugly so they don’t get kidnapped.” Moner soon worked out her character. “She’s a spoiled brat who has been turning a blind eye, mostly due to her [cartel boss] father shielding her her whole life from what he does. It’s true for a lot of these drug cartel families — they’re rich, they’re protected by the bodyguards, they don’t really see what’s going on.”
Sollima wants us to feel that. Much of the ambush sequence, a sprawling set-piece which has been filming for days, has been shot from Isabela Reyes’ perspective. “The shoot-out is cool,” says the director, “but what is more important is to tell the story of a 15-year-old girl. She lives in a sort of bubble, a premium world, because of her father. She never experienced this. So the entire point of the sequence is to put her in the middle of a war, looking at her reaction to the violence.”
Moner brings the point home. “With my character,” she says, “they’re throwing a bunny into the ocean with a bunch of sharks, and have you watch that and cringe. It’s crazy what this girl has to go through.” Benicio Del Toro, who spends much of the film with Moner, has his own animal metaphor. “Suddenly the lion is with the puppy,” he says of Alejandro’s journey with Isabela. “Hopefully you’ll get a sense of what can go wrong here: ‘Oh my God, we saw him killing kids [in the first film], and now he’s kidnapping a kid?’”
In his trailer on the Soldado set before a take, Del Toro is considered, focused, in a zone of his own. “In the first movie we just learn that he’s a quiet guy, a little bit of a robot, bent on vengeance,” he says of Alejandro’s development. “In this one we see another side to him, a human side.” He’s also enjoying how Sollima is dialling things up. “The battles are bigger, greedier,” he says.
That, though, is taking its toll. For many of the cast, Soldado is proving to be mentally tough. Empire sits down with Manuel García-rulfo, who plays cartel bigwig Gallo. The Mexican actor looks haunted, despite growing up around cartel families in Guadalajara. “I was in Mexico three weeks ago and I was telling my mother I’m so afraid of doing this film because it’s very dark,” he admits. One scene particularly frightens him. “I can’t say what it is. It’s just too dark, man. It brings me to a very, very, very dark place, I don’t think I’ve ever gone that far. It’s too cruel what Gallo does, and the bad thing is that it’s real. I’m like, ‘Holy shit, man.’ At the beginning I was having fun thinking about the character, then I started digging more and I was like, ‘This is real. How can people do this to girls, kids, humans?’ It’s scary.”
Even Del Toro, back for round two, says things are tough. “Am I gonna be happy when I finish this movie? Yes, I’m gonna be very happy,” he says, solemnly. “I’m gonna need to decompress a little bit afterwards.” May 2018. The film is finished, yet some are still smarting. “Emotionally, it was pretty draining,” says Moner. “My mom said she wanted to buy me a puppy because I looked so sad. Stefano would throw me in a room and be like, ‘Alright, you’ve just gotten kidnapped, we’re taking this off of you and you’ve got to react and pound on the door and try to escape through the window. Go.’ With all the crying, you get a little dehydrated. There would be days where I would lose my voice because I was screaming so much. That’s when I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I should go to bed earlier.’”
Sollima felt for his cast, but is happy with the results. “They’re incredibly talented actors, and the story that we were telling was really dramatic and exhausting. I think that they just experienced parts of what their characters experienced. The pain. It was a really intense job. I think it’s good to take a character beyond their emotional limits.” A character, or an actor? “Both.” He is also confident that the film — a much dirtier, bloodier affair than Sicario — goes exactly as far as it needs to. “It’s brutal, but honest. This is the world we’re reflecting: it’s brutal and it’s violent, so I’m not shy to show this.”
Everybody’s okay, though. In fact, Moner’s abiding memory is of Brolin farting. More or less. “In between takes we would make fart noises, and have competitions to see who could do the most realistic,” she says. “I gotta tell you though, I’m a little bit better than he is. I have a wide range. I put it under my special talents in my résumé.”
Meanwhile, there is hopeful talk of a third film. Sheridan “has ideas, yeah,” says Erica Lee, and there are even rumblings of a return for Emily Blunt. “If there is a third, hopefully she would come back for that,” says Lee. “At the end of Sicario, Emily’s character made a moral choice and it almost cost her her life,” adds producer Ed Mcdonnell. “We’d laugh about what the sequel would be, and she said, ‘The only way I’m coming back is if I kill these two guys,” referring to Matt and Alejandro. Which really has us hankering for another one. What a wonderfully dark saga this is.
Sicario 2: Soldado is in cinemas from 29 june