BTS - Wild Horse Nine

IBC

Martin McDonagh writes specifically for places and characters that inspire him, and Easter Island could not simply be recreated elsewhere, DoP Ben Davis explains

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Isolated in the Pacific, 2,300 miles from the mainland, Rapa Nui provides an extraordinary setting for Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine. Its green hills, violent history and monumental moai statues establish a world that is both beautiful and unsettling, reflecting the film’s blend of political intrigue, dark comedy and emotional complexity.

The location itself was non-negotiable, explains cinematographer Ben Davis BSC.

“Martin wouldn't have made the film anywhere else. It was only ever going to be on Easter Island.”

Working with McDonagh for the fourth time after Seven Psychopaths; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; and The Banshees of Inisherin, Davis says the director typically develops a project privately before bringing collaborators into the process.

“I'm used to working on films where they’re still writing the script as you're making it but never with Martin. He has usually told me about the project that's in his head as a general outline but he’ll only send me the script once he's completely happy with it and that's exactly what we make.”

Wild Horse Nine is set in 1973, shortly before the CIA-backed coup which toppled Chilean president Salvador Allende. The story evolved considerably from an earlier version that was also set on Easter Island but featured different characters and a different historical period.

“This is far more political than anything he's made,” Davis suggests. “It was only after Martin went there and spent some time in Chile that he realised what he wanted to say. I guess there's a lot of anger in what we see in politics at the moment, so this story was a response to what's going on in the world since making Banshees.”

Davis himself had visited Easter Island for a week in 1999 giving him a head-start in imagining the script playing out.

“From the first outset I felt both Martin and I wanted it to have colour and contrast and we wanted you to feel this big juxtaposition between Santiago and Easter Island.”

To develop the look, he took several cameras on a location scout, including a stills camera loaded with Kodak Ektachrome, a Super 8 camera also loaded with Ektachrome, and a digital camera.

“It was the same process with Banshees [where Irish west coast island Inis Mór was a principal location for the fictional Inisherin]. When you go there, naturally there's a lot of weather and it can be very windswept with slate-grey seas and overcast.”

He says they wanted to contrast the island’s beauty with the melancholic mood of Chris, one of two bickering CIA protagonists (played by John Malkovich, the other by Sam Rockwell), holidaying among the moai.

“Chris is a man coming to the end of his life and trying to comes to terms with what he has done. There's a line of dialogue about a college student he has met on the island where he says ‘She's life and I’m leaving it’ which I think speaks to a part of all of us that becomes very aware of the beauty of the world that we’re leaving. So it was very important that the island felt like that, with big punches of colour.”

Another idea that Davis pitched to McDonagh was to evoke the 1970s strongly enough that audiences might imagine the film had been photographed in the period, “without making the imagery excessively nostalgic or reverential.”

To achieve this the production shot on a mix of film and digital. The principal camera was the ARRI Alexa 35, with select scenes captured on 16mm and Super 8mm film.

The opening sequence establishes this layered approach. Archival 16mm footage of crowds cheering Allende’s electoral victory in the Plaza de Armas de Santiago in 1970 bleed into the dramatised narrative shot at the same location on Super 8mm.

“It was very important we get that right. It’s always tricky to balance exteriors in bright sun to a darker interior, but here we also segue from grainy library footage into the Super 8 which is an integral element of the film.”

The Super 8 material is nominally shot by Chris as a home video accompanied by his narrated introspection. Davis also used a 16mm camera to capture dusk scenes and details of the island that he felt were important to the story (some of it tuned in post to resemble Super 8) while aerial photography is used to establish the island itself. Davis briefed a drone operator and pilot to film an “arsenal of shots” for coverage.

“If you shoot an island from land you could be anywhere but to show you’re on an island and how isolated it is, you kind of need to remove yourself photography from the ground.”

Although there were opportunities for elaborate camera movement, much of Wild Horse Nine unfolds through extended conversations, often between two characters in a car or sitting at a table.

“You could circle around them and do funky moves, but this isn't that sort of film. The cinematography has to serve the story. If you started to notice what the camera's doing, then I've failed in some way because you should really be listening to what they're saying.”

Davis and ‘A’ camera operator Des Whelan frequently worked with two cameras and shot multiple takes, allowing McDonagh and editor Mikkel E.G. Nielsen to explore different emotional registers in performance.

“The idea was to give editorial a wealth of coverage so that they had control over the rhythm of the film and options to cut these intense conversations with wider visual counterpoints.”

Davis chose vintage Super Baltar lenses for their distinctive rendering and gentle fall-off, favouring their imperfections over a more clinical image. He also carried Cooke lenses, switching to them particularly when characters were positioned towards the edges of the frame.

Achieving consistency across the acquisition formats required extensive preparation, not least because of the distance the production was from any post facility, let alone a lab.

He developed a LUT with Goldcrest colourist Adam Glasman, referencing the colour photography of William Eggleston, and in post worked on “isolating colours that you want to punch, like the red car, to sort of leap off the screen at you.

“Ektachrome really lends itself to colour so then we had to find a way of getting the digital to look like Ektachrome and it was a long process. It doesn't come naturally to get it that way.”

Davis elaborates, “I really do like shooting digitally but there are certain things that film does better. Particularly in the colours of day exterior where you're looking at these deep blues, these greens and this punchy red - film just does that right out the bat. You develop it, it comes back and you go ‘Wow! that looks great.’ To get the DI to look like that you have to work a little bit in post.”

Supported by Cinelab Film & Digital, dailies were sent to London where Glasman arranged remote grading sessions with the DP “just to tweak things. Generally we set up with a look we wanted and didn't do any messing around with it on set. The costumes and sets were all predetermined and tested.”

The Super 8 and 16mm rushes were only shipped to Cinelab at the end of ten weeks’ principal photography. “Fingers crossed, it was alright.”

Later Cinelab performed a Digital-Film-Digital (DFD) process, transferring the graded digital images onto 35mm film negative before scanning them back into the digital workflow. The transfer was made onto Kodak 50D stock.

Davis explains, “It just broke up the highlights in the digital footage and gave it more of the softer character we wanted. When you’re looking at hot sun on sea you get a lot of specular highlights which on film just works but on digital you can be left with hard hot lights, back lights or shiny faces. That’s a wonderful thing that film does that we had to try and emulate later.”

Much of the film’s budget went on the logistics of getting equipment to the island, including period cars. “We had to be very frugal with what we brought and that included a very small crew,” he says.

The production built two hotel rooms as an annex to an existing hotel on the island.  These accommodate substantial interior and exterior action, allowing the production to preserve the physical continuity and authenticity that Davis says McDonagh values.

“Everything with Martin has to be genuine. There could never be a combination of a plate shot on location with a set build. He writes specific to a location and to a specific cast.”

A national park representative and an archaeologist accompanied the crew, access to certain areas was restricted (some heads are also burial grounds), and camera equipment was kept away from protected sites.

Davis believes that, despite the irreverence of some characters’ dialogue, the film treats the island and its people with respect.

“The heads are sort of silent observers. They all share the same facial expression, like a slight grin, whatever they're looking at. We also have animals in Martin’s films – horses in thie case - which are innocent victims and also silent observers of characters that I don't think you're supposed to love.

“I think you're supposed to love and respect their friendship, which is really endearing, but they’ve both killed a lot of people. They've done some despicable things in their lives. So the whole island could be seen as silent character commenting on them in some way.”