The incomparably salty and character-rich cast of Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine swept into Venice via water taxi Thursday to introduce the Oscar winner’s latest darkly literate comedy-drama.
John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Steve Buscemi and Parker Posey were all on hand to banter about the new movie with the global media ahead of its world premiere later in the evening. The only supporting cast member missing — and sorely missed he was! — was the inimitable Tom Waits.
Backed by Searchlight Pictures, Wild Horse Nine is McDonagh’s follow-up to The Banshees of Inisherin, which won Venice’s best screenplay and best actor prizes in 2022 on the way to nabbing nine Oscar nominations.
Set shortly before the 1973 military coup in Chile, Wild Horse Nine stars Malkovich and Rockwell as Chris and Lee, longtime CIA partners stationed in Santiago who are dispatched to Easter Island by their bureau chief, MJ (Buscemi) to assist in the U.S.’s covert campaign to undermine the democratically elected Chilean government. Against the surreal backdrop of the island’s monumental Moai statues, the pair begin reckoning with their murky shared past.
McDonagh said he didn’t intend for the film to be a commentary on contemporary geopolitics, but that the project seems to have taken on a more timely resonance in the wake of the United States’ military action in Venezuela and the kidnapping of the country’s president Nicolás Maduro earlier this year.
The director said he was struck by the differences between the era he depicted as much as the similarities with the current U.S. government.
“One of the frightening things is that they don’t seem to be making it covert anymore, which is very strange,” he said. “Like in the ’70s, at least these horrible people had the intelligence to keep their acts secret, but it just feels like things are getting stupider and stupider and stupider.”
“When I wrote the film and when we made it, it was to talk about 1973 and Chile at that point,” he went on. “But watching it now, it does seem to have a bit of a commentary on present-day geopolitics. It wasn’t necessarily deliberate, but I guess a lot of these things just naturally come in when you’re open to this subject matter. So I think it’s going to be fascinating to see how an audience takes it — something that is seemingly a historical piece, but has tentacles and connections to what’s going on today.”
McDonagh has said he conceived of the project after a trip he made to Easter Island over 10 years ago. Fascinated by the Moai, the island’s peculiar isolation and the wild horses roaming its landscape, he became determined to build a movie around the location, but it took him years to find a story.
The director said he wrote various versions of the script — one involving a father and son, another featuring two actor characters — before settling on the notion of two CIA agents bumbling and tangling on the island.
“I’d been very interested in the truth of what the CIA has been doing, you know, over the last 50 or 60 years, and the awful things they’ve done all around the world,” he explained. “The film also touches on Guatemala and the Congo, the Bay of Pigs. I think maybe this is something that’s not talked about enough. You know, we know what the KGB are like, but we probably don’t question the CIA’s activities as much as we ought to.”
“We had the most magnificent time on the island,” he later said of the remote and challenging shoot on Easter Island. “Every single one of us came away feeling spiritually helped by the place.”
“I never wanted to go to Easter Island, what a boring place,” Posey joked.
“No, what a mystical part of the world,” she added. “I couldn’t believe I got to go there.”
Wild Horse Nine marks McDonagh’s third film and fourth collaboration with Rockwell. Their partnership began on Broadway in 2010, when Rockwell starred opposite Christopher Walken in McDonagh’s play A Behanding in Spokane. Rockwell subsequently appeared in the director’s offbeat comedy drama Seven Psychopaths, and later won the supporting actor Oscar for his performance as a volatile cop in McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. McDonagh said he wrote Rockwell’s role in Wild Horse Nine specifically for him.
“I often have Sam in my head,” McDonagh said, adding with a laugh: “I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”
McDonagh wrote as well as directed Wild Horse Nine, also producing alongside longtime collaborators Graham Broadbent and Pete Czernin, along with Anita Overland for Blueprint Pictures. His regular cinematographer Ben Davis shot the film.
Wild Horse Nine will have its world premiere in competition in Venice’s Sala Grande on Thursday evening.
Searchlight Pictures will release Wild Horse Nine in U.S. theaters on Nov. 6, positioning the film as one of its major fall awards-season titles. Following Venice, the film hits Telluride and the Toronto International Film Festival.