INTERVIEW WITH ‘HEATHENS AND THIEVES’ WRITER AND CO-DIRECTOR
JOHN DOUGLAS SINCLAIR
When I ran my review of HEATHENS AND THIEVES in the
beginning of July, (to read it, go HERE) I was discussing a movie that few people had as yet any
chance to see. Since then, this Western Noir has been playing in festivals and
garnering awards:
Special Jury Award and Best Actress Award for Gwendoline Yeo
at the WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival.
Outstanding Dramatic Feature at the Sacramento
Audience Favorite
Award at the Downtown Film Festival, Los Angeles
Best Western at the Columbia
Audience Choice for
Best Feature at the Sacramento
Coming up on Friday, September 21st, HEATHENS AND
THIEVES will screen at the New Jersey Film Festival. In fact, this Saturday, September 8th,
it’s the Closing Night film of the Rome International Film Festival – and while
that may be in Rome , Georgia ,
the movie is getting an international reputation: on Friday, October 12th it will
screen in Spain
And in October and November, HEATHENS AND THIEVES will
become available in DVD and VOD – I’ll have the exact dates very soon. The film was made by OROFINO, a production
company consisting of writer/co-director John Douglas Sinclair, co-director
Megan Peterson, producer Peter Scott, and director of photography Pyongson Yim.
HENRY: You wrote it, but you co-directed it. Most co-directors these days have the same
last name, whether it’s Coen or Singleton.
How did you two come together, and what is it like co-directing?
JOHN: The way we came together was, we and the director of
photography, Pyongson Yim,
had been friends for a number of years.
We had all been working in ‘the industry’ in various ways. But none of us doing what we’d set out to do
in the first place, which was getting features made.
H: What had you and Megan been doing prior to this?
J: Well, I had been writing.
I won the Nicholl Fellowship from the Academy for screenwriting, so I
had been working on trying to get my own stuff made. I hadn’t been successful in selling or making
it myself, and Megan and Pyongson had both been working a lot in reality
television, doing some really interesting DISCOVERY and NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
shows, but also less interesting reality shows.
Megan was field producing, and Pyongson was shooting. Most people get into this business with
either narrative features or TV in their heart, and so you have to remind
yourself, hey, if we don’t do it, we’ll never get it done. So we kind of put ourselves to it, and started
telling everyone that we were going to make a movie, and realized, oh my God,
now we’re on the hook; we’ve got to do it.
We realized that, between the three of us, we had the
ability to do this. The way it started
actually was that Megan and Pyongson had been talking about doing a film, but
I’m more of a writer than they are. So I
mentioned maybe I could come up with a script, and Megan said, “Well, we have
to do a western.” I’m like, “Why a
western?” Because I’d never written a
western. But it was because Megan’s
family lived up north in Etna ,
California
H: I was struck by how many horses you see in one shot. Because with westerns today, sometimes you say,
‘Isn’t that the same horse the other guy was riding?’
J: Exactly! We were
so lucky! When I heard we were going to
get twenty-five or thirty horses, I said, “Well, I’ve got to write a stampede
into this.” I really wrote around the
location and the resources – what we had.
Of course I threw some challenges into the script that we weren’t really
prepared for, like the explosion.
H: That was huge! I
that that was going to take out all the buildings on the farm!
J: It took out all
the windows in the actual set house that we used, even though we had boarded
them up. I grew up like anyone, loving
westerns, but I didn’t have any particular special knowledge of them. Rather than go back and watch a bunch, I
said, well, let’s just see what comes out.
What’s in my subconscious; what kind of western would I like to
see. We always knew we wanted it
informed by a sense of noir, not a
hyper-stylized noir, but we loved the
sense of playing with some shadows, playing with some moral ambiguity, and a
femme fatale at the center. I wanted
everyone to have a real motive, nobody just to be a villain entirely, which I
always respected about UNFORGIVEN: that was always one of my favorite Westerns. Everyone has a reason for being the way they
are, even if they’re a little misguided.
So that’s how we came together.
And as far as co-directing, we spent a lot of time in pre-production
just making sure we were on the same page on everything, and also with
Pyongson, our D.P. The three of us
really worked the story together so that by the time we got on the set, we were
able to make decisions without always consulting with each other. For the hard stuff, we would always hash it
out. But a lot of times, Megan would
rush off and help establish a lighting mood with the D.P. while I was walking
the characters through the next scene.
We stepped in wherever we were needed.
H: You rarely run into a female D.P.
J: Yes, it’s rare, and not only is she a woman; she’s a
Korean woman, which is not super-common.
I felt from the beginning that no one but Pyongson could have shot this
movie; she’s such a rising talent, has a unique vision.
H: Visually, it has a DESPERATE HOURS kind of a feel, where
a great deal of it is taking place on one night, in one place, so what the interior
looks like is hugely important. There
was a tendency in westerns, in the late 60s and 70s to bounce-light everything,
and it was always too bright. And after
that it got terribly murky and dark. She
did a beautiful job of using shadow, but not making everyone pitch black,
making the lighting seem motivated.
J: Thank you. One of the things she was up against was, we
shot it on the Red One camera, and it was kind of experimental because none of
us had used that camera before. She
wanted to use that noir shadow thing,
but she didn’t want to lose detail by not lighting enough. And so she was walking an interesting line
there, to have enough to play with on post production. And I should say that the four of us, we
raised the funding ourselves, so that between the four of us we would have
complete creative control, and live or die by our own sword, instead of someone
else’s. So the four of us brought
together whatever talents we could.
H: Tell me about that huge explosion.
J: Steven Riley is the guy who was responsible for setting
that all up. He is one of our executive
producers, he and David Poole. Steven’s
the pyrotechnics and special effects coordinator in the last eight or ten Clint
Eastwood movies. He claims that for GRAN
TORINO, he’s the only man who’s ever shot Clint Eastwood dead in a movie. He’s done SPIDER MAN, he’s done PEARL HARBOR , he was the head guy on the train crash in
SUPER 8. We were so lucky to get this
guy. Basically he was in a point in his
career where he was doing this for years – his first movie was PETE’S DRAGON,
back in the 70s. And he said, I want to
learn the producing side a little bit.
He came on as executive producer.
His son Ryan Riley became the special effects coordinator, with his
father kind of overseeing, and together they brought up their 46 foot trailer
with everything you could ever want, and we really couldn’t have done it
without them setting up the explosion.
They even brought out the guy who was responsible for overseeing
pyrotechnics in TITANIC for the day, and he helped oversee as well, because it
was super-dangerous apparently.
And when we’re ready to do the explosion, he calls the local
volunteer fire, to arrange for a permit for the day. And they said, what day of the week are you
planning top do this? Tuesday. They said, oh, we’re off that day. Go ahead: do whatever you want. Half the town came out and watched. We had warned them because we didn’t want any
unpleasant surprises. This is one of
those dream situations where you’re bringing up a village of people from Hollywood
H: You shot it all in Etna California
J: Yes, almost all in Etna and the surrounding valley. It’s 11 ½ hours north of Los
Angeles , you’re maybe an hour and a half from the Oregon New Mexico
H: You’ve got the green west; not the tan.
J: Exactly. And
because I knew we were doing it there, I thought, what is unique about that
area, when I was trying to think what kind of western. I thought that the Chinese element is
something that’s been really overlooked.
In DEADWOOD you have that element.
But when I was researching, I could only find one American western that
singled out a Chinese woman as a major character, and that was A THOUAND PIECES
OF GOLD, with a young Chris Cooper in it, back in the 80’s. I don’t think it’s ever even made it to
DVD. It’s not a very well-known movie.
H: It certainly
isn’t. There was the AMC miniseries,
BROKEN TRAIL, and of course you have the lady from BROKEN TRAIL, Gwendoline
Yeo.
J: When I saw BROKEN
TRAIL I thought, my God, she’d be perfect!
And she really wanted to do it, she loved the character,. But she said, ‘My agent has warned me, if you
do this, don’t make it like BROKEN TRAIL.
Make sure that they let you look prettier. More made up.” Because in BROKEN TRAIL she was out on the
road and had no make-up on.
H: I hadn’t thought of it before, but in a way her character
is very much a parallel character to Claudia Cardinale’s in ONCE UPON A TIME IN
THE WEST.
J: Yes, very much so, but I hadn’t thought of that either.
That isn’t what I modeled her on, but I’m sure that was buried in my
psyche. I love those Sergio Leone’s –
those are my favorite westerns. Along with
UNFORGIVEN, and some of the earlier Clint Eastwood ones, JOSEY WALES. Those are the kind of westerns that I really
love.
H: As you said, you
weren’t setting out to make westerns initially.
Did you watch westerns very much as a kid?
J: I was aware of westerns.
I remember seeing some John Waynes, the original TRUE GRIT, as a
kid. I think it would be hard to grow up
in this country and not be aware of westerns; they’re in our psyche. But at the same time I never was particularly
drawn to them. When I saw GOOD, THE BAD
AND THE UGLY and UNFORGIVEN, that opened my eyes – I wasn’t aware of this kind
of western earlier, and that’s what excited me.
My manager jokes that anytime anyone asks what genre I’m into, he’s
like, ‘Pick a day.’ I just finished
writing, for another director a script for hire, an independent documentary. There’s a lot of recreations and things, so
it’s very narrative, and I’d never done that before either. That’s what I love, to pick up a challenge;
there’s a story for every genre’.
H: Do you see yourself primarily as a writer or a director?
J: I really feel like I want to write and direct, both. Writing has been the base of my career; I’ve
always been a writer, trying to sell scripts for other people to do. But once I got a taste of directing – I
started off with some shorts, separately, as did Megan, but when we did this
feature I realized: this is the reward!
All the pain of writing – this is the fun part, going out there with an
army of talented people! We had a
production designer and art director who really just excelled in finding
authentic stuff from that time period and making it feel real. And our costumer – she had done a lot of
independent film before; she’d done CHUCK AND BUCK and REAL WOMEN HAVE
CURVES. And that’s what brought her onto
our set; she was looking for a western because it was the one thing she hadn’t
done, and she wanted to try her hand at it.
I have to say, all of us up on that set, surrounded by mountains and
horses and guns and everything! It
really brings out the six-year-old kid in everybody, to do a western – even if
they didn’t know they were western fans at heart.
H: How long a shooting schedule did you have?
J: We had a unique case.
We shot it in two parts, over about two weeks in the spring, then took
the summer off, to raise more money, because we knew we didn’t have enough
money to shoot the whole thing. So we
took a real risk in saying, let’s shoot about a third of the movie, and we’ll
cut the footage into a trailer, and try to excite more interest to bring
everyone back together. So we came back
in the fall and shot for close to a month; five or six weeks shooting
(altogether).
H: What sort of scenes did you shoot in those first two
weeks, to raise the rest of the budget?
J: We shot almost
entirely interiors. We realized that the
weather was going to change vastly from spring to fall, so if we shot outdoor
scenes, they would look very different (and not match). And the only exterior scene in the movie that
we shot that first spring period was a nighttime shot, because no matter what
the weather, it will look like night.
It’s when he’s sneaking out of the bunkhouse with his boots off.
H: What was your budget?
J: We’re really not supposed to say. If we hadn’t gotten so much from people
giving their time, their services, their resources, I would say it would be a
two to four million dollar movie, if we had to pay for everything. The explosion alone would have been a good
portion of a million, probably, if Warner Brothers had done it.
H: The production is very impressive. You really feel like it’s all on the screen.
J: That’s why we ran out of money so often. Like when we finished in the fall, we had to raise money to do post (production), because we wanted to do it right; we didn’t want to short-change what was on the screen. We were so lucky to have so many good people. And Don Swayze, Patrick’s brother, became such a great force on set; I think he gave just a riveting performance.
H: He was terrific. I
love that he was a villain that doesn’t think of himself as a villain. And I think it’s a tribute to your writing;
I’m sure what appealed to these actors so much is that everyone is playing a
really solid character.
J: On a practical level, too, when you’re doing a small
independent movie, you don’t have a lot of money to throw at actors. You want good actors, and the only other way
to get them is if they feel like these are really meaty roles to play. It’s not what I set out thinking, but in
retrospect that’s really important, I think, not to overlook the practical side
of filmmaking. When I started on the
story I knew that we would be limited, that we wouldn’t have a cast of
hundreds. We’re not going to have a big
town like DEADWOOD or anything like that.
So I realized that every character becomes more important, because you
have so few. I first thought, what kind
of western do I like? And I thought THE
GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. Well, what’s
that about? It’s about three guys after
the same thing. That’s the whole story
in a way. And if you stick to something
simple like that, then each of their motives – it’s less about plotting and
more about who they are and how they collide with each other.
H: It’s like the MALTESE FALCOLN isn’t about the falcon;
it’s about all the people who want to get it.
J: Like the gold or the falcon, it really doesn’t matter:
it’s about the people, and what they’re willing to give up, or do to each
other.
H: How did you get your cast together?
J: We cast over a period of, like, six to nine months. We saw tons of people. Some of the small characters, Pearl, the
blonde in the saloon, and the deputy, Joel Barry and Cecelie Bull, they were
friends of mine and Megan’s, and I wrote those parts with them in mind. Everyone else came in various ways. For Gwendoline, we had a friend who had
acting classes with her, so he sent her the script, and she was cool enough to
come to an audition. And she was
responsible for bringing us Don Swayze and Boyuen, who plays her husband in the
movie. Again, she had had acting classes
with them in the past. The moment she
saw the Col. Sherman Rutherford role, she’s like, I know the perfect guy for
this. Don came in and auditioned with
Gwendoline, and he’s throwing her against the wall, and they’re beating up on
each other, falling on the floor, and I’m like oh my God, these two are perfect
together.
When we were shooting in the spring, Don’s brother was
dying. And he was really just filled
with rage and sadness and fury, so he said he kept himself sane by pouring it
into that character, just letting it go.
Every night he was on the phone with his brother, and hoping that
Patrick wasn’t going to die when he was up there, and Patrick kept telling him,
you’re doing the right thing, this is a good role for you. Patrick didn’t die until the shoot was over,
so Don, thankfully, was able to be with him.
H: Andrew Simpson, the male lead, is interesting because he
has virtually no credits. But he’s very
good; he’s someone the camera really likes.
J: He’s doing a web series now, but we get to say he’s our
discovery, because he hadn’t done much.
When we were looking at guys for the lead, I realized, and Megan
realized that the great western leading men of the 1960s, like Clint and Burt
Reynolds and Charles Bronson – those guy were real men, and you could believe that
they had killed people, you know? Or
they could live for a week in the forest.
Whereas it’s hard to find leading men of that age-range now that feel
like that. Even when you look at the big
Hollywood movies now, they’re all too
pretty.
H: Pretty and soft.
J: Yeah! We don’t
want an Orlando Bloom, someone like that.
When we met Andy, at first we weren’t sure what we thought of him; he
came to read for Moses, the man in black.
Then we saw him and said, why don’t you read for the lead. We tried him against Gwendoline, and again,
of all the guys we put against her in the audition, (he was) the only one that
seemed really able to handle her. He
felt to me like he was tough, but also had that wounded element to him, like a
prize-fighter, who’s had some rough knocks in his life. And we felt he had the right presence, so
let’s see if he can carry this feature.
This isn’t explicit in the movie, but in my mind, this story
was, you have your archetypal ‘man with no name,’ but how did the guy become that
guy? Where did he come from? And in a way, Andy’s character, Saul, I feel
is the guy that, the next time you see him, he’ll be riding into one of those
dusty towns, a man with no name, cold and hard, but with maybe a little bit of
warmth inside him. But he’s a killer
now; he’s a hero and a killer. To me the
story was about getting him there. Even
the name, Saul. Biblically, he’s Saul
before he becomes Paul, becomes that transformed guy. This is his Saul stage. That’s not something everyone’s going to look
into and see, but for me, creatively, those were sort of important elements to
his arc.
TYRONE POWER in MARK OF ZORRO at the AUTRY Sept. 8
As part of their continuing series, What is a Western?, the
Autry will screen one of the greatest of swash-bucklers, THE MARK OF ZORRO
(1940), starring Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell, and directed by the maestro of
BLOOD AND SAND and DR. JECKYLL AND MR. HYDE, Rouben Mamoulian. It even features, from THE ADVENTURES OF
ROBIN HOOD, the greatest of all sword-wielding villains, Basil Rathbone, and
the most delightful friar of them all, Eugene Pallette. Jeffrey
Richardson, the Autry’s Gamble Curator of Western History, Popular Culture, and
Firearms, will lead the discussion before the film, which screens at 1:30 in
the Wells Fargo Theatre.
And if this one puts you in the mood for more of the bold
renegade who carves a Z with his blade, come back to the Autry on Saturday,
September 15th, when, as part of the Latino Heritage Month
celebration, the Autry will screen episodes of the 1990s ZORRO series, and of
THE HIGH CHAPARRAL, all featuring actor Henry Darrow, who will be signing his
autobiography.
EASTWOOD AT THE AERO SANTA
MONICA
The American Cinemateque at the Aero is featuring several
Clint Eastwood Westerns in September. On
Wednesday, Sept. 5th it’s THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES; on Monday, Sept.
10th it’s a 20th anniversary screening of UNFORGIVEN; and
on Tuesday, Sept. 25th it’s TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARAH, co-starring Shirley Macaine, directed by
Don Siegel, scripted by Budd Boetticher, with an amusing score by Ennio Morricone.
‘THE VIRGINIAN’ RETURNS ON INSP!
Not content to rest on their laurels, after announcing the
return to the airwaves of THE HIGH CHAPARRAL, INSP has announced that THE
VIRGINIAN will be added to their Saddle-Up Saturday schedule! Coinciding with the series’ 50th
Anniversary celebration at the Autry on September 22nd, a VIRGINIAN
marathon will play on INSP, and the following Saturday it will become part of
the regular line-up. Premiering in
1962, it was the first western series to run 90 minutes; in effect, it was a
weekly movie. Based on Owen Wister’s
novel, it ran nine seasons and 249 episodes, all of them starring James Drury
as the title character without a name. Drury
says, “I am thrilled that THE VIRGINIAN is coming back to television. And there’s no better place to call home than
INSP. They have brought back so many of
the shows that America
That's all for this week! Next week I'll have info about an upcoming RAMONA event, The Western Writer's of America's Round-up Magazine's take on direct-to-home-video westerns, my review of two different published screenplays for CHEYENNE WARRIOR II, and more!
Hope you had a great Labor Day! Uh-oh, it's dark, and I' haven't brought the flag in yet!
Happy Trails,
Henry
All Original Contents Copyright September 2012 by Henry C. Parke -- All Rights Reserved
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