Way Out West: John Maclean on Slow West
For his debut feature film, John Maclean has ventured where few UK filmmakers have gone before: the wild expanse of the Old West. The former Beta Band knob-twiddler talks about going from making films with his bandmates to directing Michael Fassbender
The American West is a landscape that has loomed large over movie history. Westerns moved from the shadows of the ‘pulp’ literature they superseded at the dawn of film to become the predominant genre of modern cinema’s most formative years, the 40s and 50s. As such, heavyweight directors ever since have found themselves drawn to the Western: Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch and the Coen brothers (among many others) have all engaged in different ways with the American West and the titans of film who drew its cinematic boundaries – John Ford, Howard Hawks and Anthony Mann, and later Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah.
As such, it’s a bold move for your first step into the world of feature film to be taken on the prairie. But that’s exactly what John Maclean has done with Slow West, his visually arresting and ethereal tale of a melancholic, well-reared young Scot (Kodi Smit-McPhee) making his way west across the American continent to find and protect his childhood sweetheart, under the guidance of Michael Fassbender’s morally ambiguous, brooding cowboy.
Maclean made the move into cinema after making his name as a mainstay of the Scottish music scene, first as part of The Beta Band and then in The Aliens. He describes how his interest in cinema can be traced back to his early days at art school in Edinburgh where he worked “at the Cameo cinema, watching double bills and getting a film education there, and then when I was studying art in London I worked at the Gate cinema. I was always working in cinemas and interested in film.” His first experience behind a camera came shooting promos for his group. “Straight away I said to the record company that I’d like to do the music videos for the band, and that was the next education – starting to work with crews, and how to edit, and make films with no money, and use The Beta Band as my actors.”
Music videos were an invaluable crash-course in how to shoot something striking on a tight budget. “I was trying not to make a single video that was just a performance of the band playing,” he says. “They were all kind of short films in themselves. Some of them had bits of dialogue and sound. It felt like I was trying to make little bits of short films, with stories.” As a result, “it didn’t feel like a massive leap after I got out of being in bands to start making short films.”
Michael Fassbender as Silas and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Jay Cavendish in Slow West | image: Lionsgate
Slow West is actually the third collaboration between Maclean and Fassbender, the duo having previously worked together on two short films, including the BAFTA award-winning Pitch Black Heist (2011). “I got to know Michael’s agent,” Maclean explains, “and he showed him some of The Beta Band videos, and Michael saw something in them. One evening I managed to meet him and he was shooting at the time, but he said ‘I’ve got a day off, do you fancy doing something?’ It started off professionally, and then on each project we did we got more and more used to collaborating – it became very interesting.”
The shift in gear from filming bandmates in music videos to working with one of the world’s foremost actors isn’t lost on Maclean. “It’s crazy that I went from basically my friends acting to Michael being the first professional actor that I’d ever shot!” Was he nervous shooting him for the first time? “Yeah! It was comedic. I almost fell over. I’d been used to people not taking what I was trying to do seriously, mates basically too coy or shy or cool to do the ridiculous things, or to have the confidence to really ‘act’. And then all of a sudden he switches it on, and he becomes somebody else. It really hit me the first time I saw that.”
The choice of a Western was partly informed by Fassbender’s allegiance to Maclean’s work (the part was written for him after he agreed to be a part of Maclean’s first film), and partly by the videos Maclean had been working on. “The narratives for the videos for The Beta Band were almost like silent movies; they weren’t really script-heavy. With the first film I did with Michael I took a bit of that ethos, which was to try to make a visual story, rather than trying to do something really wordy.” Part of the appeal of the Western to filmmakers is its sheer ‘openness’ – the landscapes can play just as big a part as any character, while the canonical tropes of the genre are there to be played with and subverted as well.
Trained as a visual artist, Maclean sees the appeal of “genre in general, because you can keep dialogue to a minimum. When you're making a noir, or a thriller, or Westerns, you don’t have to have people talking for long periods of time.” Indeed, although Slow West’s dialogue is authentic and engaging, it’s the film’s visual palette that proves its most arresting feature, with Maclean turning his New Zealand locations into an American landscape full of gangsters, charlatans, and honest people trying to earn a buck, or running away from dark European pasts.
It was important for him to have this European element central to the story – the idea of a Scottish character displaced to the American West was where it began. “I think you have to stick to the truth. I’m sure ET was about dealing with the loss of a parent or a friend. For me, Slow West felt like the love story of a Scottish boy who was in love with a girl who was out of his league. So, that felt like an element of truth! Or seeing America through a European’s eyes, of a traveller, rather than making a film that’s really about Native Americans or about the politics of America.”
“It’s crazy that I went from basically my friends acting to Michael Fassbender being the first professional actor that I’d ever shot!” – John Maclean
When we draw comparisons with Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders’ similarly plaintive exploration of American landscapes and lost love, Maclean is eager to concur, describing it as a “a dream-like European vision of America,” one in tune with his own formative experiences of travelling through the States with The Beta Band and, earlier, on a road trip with friends. “I was always fascinated by America. The real America, where you travel around and you meet people and they’re friendly and accommodating, and the landscape’s stunning. And then there’s the other half of me that saw ‘cinema America’: when you’re in small towns you think of David Lynch, when you’re in New York you think of Scorsese, when you’re in LA you think of Chinatown. It’s so filmic – that appealed to me.”
Maclean enthuses about the films that informed Slow West, explaining his desire to “avoid the Spaghetti Westerns, because they’ve been done as well as they could have been done. When people try and do it now, I think that’s when you start seeing clichés. So I was looking much more at early Westerns like John Ford, Shane, High Noon and Red River.” There’s also hints of Altman’s classic McCabe & Mrs Miller in Slow West’s emotional subtly, and of the Coens’ black humour in the film’s more violent passages.
Nevertheless, it was the fiction of the time that Maclean turned to to conjure a sense of the real dramatic landscape of early America. “Instead of reading ‘history of the West’ books and looking at mythical documents, I was really reading a lot of books written at the time of the West – the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder and reading Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce, which gives you much more of a flavour of the time. Even some accounts of Scottish people who would go out to America.”
Maclean worked on the film’s lilting folk soundtrack alongside Australian composer Jed Kurzel (The Babadook, Snowtown). Their first aim, he says, was “to stay away from Morricone, because it’s just untouchable, so I wanted to look at something else. I was going back to traditional music and thinking about European music mixed with American music – 3/4 waltzes, staying away from anything that couldn’t have been done at the time, like electric guitars and keyboards. I wanted melody; I collect film soundtracks and there’s so many droney soundtracks now that I really wanted something melodic again.”
Slow West presents the sweep of the American desert as a blank slate waiting to be written over and reinterpreted by anyone gutsy enough to take it on, an expanse that can either be read as melodically romantic as film’s soundtrack or as existentially threatening. In Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Jay Cavendish we are presented with a dreamer thrust into the harsh truths of life at the dawn of a nation, a battle between idealism and realism that informs the film throughout. As Maclean explains, he wanted “a certain different flavour of the West than the revisionist, mythical stuff. That was important.”
As those early travellers discovered, the West can make or break you. Only at the start of his journey, Slow West shows promise enough to mark John Maclean out as a pioneer with a real future ahead of him.