An Assassin Bromance: Martin McDonagh on Making ‘Wild Horse 9’

You can go into a Martin McDonagh movie with a few safe assumptions. Expect that it’ll be driven by darkly funny dialogue, filled with characters as irascibly profane as they are oddly lovable, punctured by shocking and narrative-twisting bursts of violence.

This remains firmly true of Wild Horse Nine, the Oscar-winning Irish filmmaker’s snazzy new period piece revolving around two CIA agents and set largely on Easter Island in the last days before the 1973 Chilean coup d’état. More subtly, though, it’s a clear marker of McDonagh’s evolution behind the camera.

“I wanted this to have the most improvisational feel of any of my films,” says the In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin director, who first gained notoriety as a prize-winning playwright. “Before, I’d been very strict about sticking to the script word for word, comma for comma, [and here] in each scene, there’s probably at least one line that isn’t mine.”

It helped to bring in the right combination of actors at the top of the call sheet. True to his
theatrical roots, McDonagh likes to build a company, and it’s a thrill to see him bring John Malkovich into the fold here as its newest member.

The two-time Oscar nominee stars as Chris Carlisle, a veteran agent who’s dying of terminal cancer and wrestling with a slipping memory. Sam Rockwell, meanwhile, has worked with McDonagh for decades, winning an Oscar for his film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Here he returns to portray Chris’ protégé, Lee Chesterfield, an even-keeled anchor for their trip to Easter Island who brings a voracious appetite and a conflicted conscience.

“I wanted the boys, like good jazz musicians, to know what the tune was, but to go off on their own little ventures around it,” McDonagh says. Rockwell noticed the change in pace for the director: “He’s matured as a filmmaker, and this one has so much emotional depth because life experience gives you that. I don’t think we could have done this 10 or even five years ago. These are two grown men going through it.”

McDonagh first went to Easter Island around 15 years ago and has thought about staging a movie there ever since. He’d scrapped various versions, including one about a father and son on a bucket-list trip, before landing on this relatively politically charged idea. Indeed, he told his recurring behind-the-camera collaborators about the potential project as he was still gearing up for his previous movie, Banshees.

“Luckily, we were able to start the conversations pretty early,” says McDonagh’s longtime casting director Sarah Finn. “Easter Island is such a big part of the story, so to immerse myself in the political history and the culture and start researching Chilean actors — it felt really important to me to be authentically representing Chilean actors and the country.” Others like cinematographer Ben Davis also got to visit the location early on.

“I took a camera with me on early scouts where I took stills on Ektachrome and we brought a Super 8 camera,” Davis says. “We wanted the island to be very beautiful. I’m older now, and I’ve been experiencing end-of-life a lot more. There’s a thing that happens where, when you get to be older, you are very aware of how beautiful the world is that you are going to leave.”

Sure enough, the film contains the most dynamic visuals of any McDonagh movie, which tend to be characterized by their dense scripts. “Martin does a complete storyboard for the entire film before we start every single shot,” Davis says. “He didn’t always do that. His visual ambition has very much changed.”

The poignancy of Wild Horse Nine comes primarily through Malkovich’s tragicomic performance. Finn says his name came up very early in the casting process. McDonagh adds, “The guilt that the character feels, the regret and the analysis of a life badly led or choices poorly made in the service of something he’s starting to not believe in anymore — John can do that in a moment of silence. He can be smoking a cigarette, and because he’s got such an inner life as an actor, we read the sorrow and the mournfulness.”

“The part is quite unique because it’s a great part, and I don’t play a lot of great parts — I’ve played at least 50 cameos or things that are, let’s say, maybe underwritten,” Malkovich says with a laugh. “Chris is dying and looking back on his life and kind of saying, ‘Hey, what about all that? What was I thinking?’ Characters don’t come along that often who are that rich.”

Frequently, the strength of Malkovich’s work comes through in the quietest moments, a testament as much to the actor’s command of the role as the movie that was built around him.

“There’s a scene when [Chris] shoots morphine, looks at a horse, sits alone — all these small things where we stay intimate with the character,” says editor Mikkel E.G. Nielsen, who won an Oscar for Sound of Metal and was nominated again for Banshees. “The dialogue is like music, so well-written from Martin, but then you add on how Malkovich plays a character — his pauses, how much he actually changes the rhythm of a scene — and you can go from something extremely funny to extremely sad.”

The layers of cutting scenes for McDonagh speaks to his unique talents, Nielsen adds: “There’s a difference between working with a director and with a writer-director.”

The production was driven by the chemistry between Malkovich and Rockwell, who pulls off his most grounded McDonagh turn to date here. Chris and Lee are thrust into a complex emotional dynamic as they confront how the former wishes to die on his own terms. “Part of the casting of John and Sam was the knowledge that they completely love each other as actors and completely respect each other and have so much affection for each other,” McDonagh says. “It’s not just that they’re CIA guys who’ve worked together a lot. They’re two actors who’ve loved each other for a long time, too.”

“He’s one of the reasons I wanted to become an actor,” Rockwell says of Malkovich. “I remember seeing him onstage in Burn This and Death of a Salesman.” They worked together about 20 years ago, on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the respect has very much been mutual from there. McDonagh would catch them rehearsing the next week’s scenes back at the hotel bar, on their own time.

“[Sam] is very serious. He’s a real student of acting, of cinema, of theater, of what an actor does,” Malkovich says. “He analyzes scenes beautifully for what happens in them and for what needs to happen in them. He’s a fantastic scholar of that.”

This goes for the whole Wild Horse Nine team, really — cast and crew alike describe a feverish dedication to getting the details right. That extends even to phone-call scenes: Parker Posey appears only long distance as Lee’s idiosyncratic, feisty wife, Marge, but they’re vividly shot on both ends,
with Marge’s home captured in lively detail and played for comedy as she roams the living room on her corded landline while bickering.

The two actors also flew across the world to film each other’s coverage — Posey for a few days on Easter Island, Rockwell in Utah — so the longtime friends could still perform face-to-face. “It’s the best way to do phone scenes,” Rockwell says. “Usually the AD reads on the back side of the camera.”

Posey is one of a handful of notable names who pop in smaller parts — Steve Buscemi portrays Chris and Lee’s weary boss, MJ; Tom Waits appears as Chris’ brother — but Finn’s canniest casting coup was that of Mariana di Girolamo, a Chilean star who broke out locally as the title character of Pablo Larraín’s Ema. She plays Monica, a college student who bumps into Chris at the Santiago airport, only to challenge his worldview when they reconnect by chance on the island.

“I had actually met Mariana in 2019, and so I had her in mind,” Finn says. The team needed to know whoever they cast in the part could handle the verbosity of McDonagh’s language: “Even Mariana said it was a challenge. But that’s something we really found in her, to make the character come alive fully and really mine all the humor that’s in the language.”

What transpires between Chris and Monica indicates the scale of McDonagh’s thematic storytelling. “It might not look like it, but I’m trying to take the violence out of my films as much as possible,” the filmmaker says. He considers the scene in which Chris warns Monica of the impending Chilean coup “the most violent part” of Wild Horse Nine, since we know the real-world brutality that indeed followed. Chris also gloats about his (and, in turn, the CIA’s) involvement in the Kennedy assassination, which McDonagh believes “makes it a fascinating turn to the story,” given that it places a controversial rumor alongside firmly documented horrors.

“Even though we were just trying to get to the truth of this situation in 1973, the repercussions of that and the echoes of that are all in … what’s going on now — something like Venezuela happened just after we finished making the film, and that’s almost a direct and even more stupid version of what happened back then,” McDonagh says. “That’s probably the wrong way to put it, but these things keep happening, and history keeps repeating itself in stupider and stupider ways. If the film is a call to anything, it’s to work out how we stop that, maybe.”

The setting offers a crucial counterweight in that regard — surrounded by thousands of miles of sea, with visuals inspired by great Westerns like John Ford’s The Searchers. (Some key American scenes were even shot in Monument Valley.) “They have these wild horses roaming, we had these dogs and cats hanging around,” Rockwell recalls. “Shooting the movie was like being on vacation.” The picturesque imagery, as Davis puts it, exists chiefly to “support the narrative.” It’s no accident that Wild Horse Nine looks and feels so bucolic, or that it’s laced with big laughs, as McDonagh’s work always is.

“It’s a very sad, elegiac look at certain events in American history, which affected quite large parts of the world,” Malkovich says. “And I think it’s a pretty mature one and a pretty refined one at that.”

This story appeared in the Nov. 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.