In the chat with filmmaker at the end of this post, Gil notes that neither Shepard nor Stephen Rea (above, who plays his nemesis, Mackinley) needed direction. They took their characters and ran with them, and by now, their finely-honed ability to underplay needs little help.
In the roles of, respectively, the young Butch, Sundance and Etta, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (above), Padraic Delaney (below, left) and Dominique McElliigott (below, right) could hardly be better. These young actors bring awonderful sense of freshness and life to the proceedings that beautifully balances the old-timers, while demonstrating how the past is always buried in our present.
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After spending half my day transcribing my interview with Mateo Gil, I managed to somehow delete it all in a single wrong combination of computer keys. As I have no more time to reconstruct, I must do this via memory. Apologies to Señor Gil, who proved a terrific interview, and a smart young man, whose command of English is very good indeed.
I first glimpsed Gil, along with Eduardo Noriega, when the duo appeared in 2000 at the FSLC with their 1999 movie Nobody Knows Anybody, which Gil adapted and directed and in which Noriega starred. Gil told me how that project came about: A producer brought it to him, first to write, and then later, to direct -- a chance at which he jumped in with both feet. The film proved an enjoyable paranoid thriller, which also proved a good success in Spain. Though I tell the filmmaker that, on the basis of that first movie, I would never have imagined him directing an old-fashioned western like Blackthorn so very well.
This led us to a discussion of why Blackthorn was not a success in Spain, a fact that Gil attributes to Spanish audiences, who seem to reject out of hand most of their home-grown movies. (This is a fact I have heard now from almost all the young Spanish directors whom I have interviewed and it is one that crops up almost yearly at the FLSC's annual Spanish Cinema Now series.) Gil also finds a political angle here, as he says that the Spanish government pushes Spanish television to support the film industry -- which Spanish TV prefers not to do, often calling Spanish cinema garbage -- even though, each year, one or two Spanish movies (last year it was Cell 211) proves a major hit. Blackthorn got its financing together several years ago, but Gil maintains that, were it to be filmed today, financing could never be raised.
Gil talked about his fears of directing actors such as Shepard and Rea, and how he worried about his ability to properly communicate. But thanks to the professionalism of the two men, he need not have worried. They knew their characters and needed very little direction,he explains. Of the youthful cast members, who played the young Butch, Sundance and Etta, Gil has nothing but praise. When you see the movie, you'll understand why. The fact they these were all European actors (financially, the film was contracted to have only one American, Mr Shepard) meant that they had to come up with credible American accents -- which all of them managed quite nicely. (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays the young Butch, is Danish! The other two are Irish.) Magaly Solier, a Peruvian actress, had to get her accent right, as well, since she is playing a Bolivian. And she did, Gil insists. (Not that you or I would be aware of this.)
We talked about some of the filmmaker's other films, for which he has written screenplays: the terrific little workplace thriller The Method, which TrustMovies found to be ahead of its time when it was releasedhere a few years ago. Gil seemed surprised by this reaction, but perhaps it hit Europe at precisely the right time, just after protests occurred regarding globalization. Were The Method ever to be redone here in the USA, Gil, says he'd love to have a shot a rewriting it because he feels certain things were off in the original script.
Another of his screenplays is for the wonderful movie Agora, which though quite a hit in Sain, did not translate to box-office revenue elsewhere. It simply cost too much, the writer feels, and could not recoup based only on its Spanish success. "We have only 40 million people in Spain," he explains. He had his first experience directing in English with Agora, because Gil was an assistant director. "It was mostly technical stuff," he tells me, and it did not leave him feeling prepared to direct in English on the set of Blackthorne.
Regarding shooting in Bolivia, this was a very smart move, the filmmaker insists. Money goes much farther there, the locations seems new and novel, and -- when I ask if had had seen the Spanish film Even the Rain, also shot in Bolivia -- he says yes, and that his crew was very lucky to follow Rain's shoot by only a few months. "We learned a lot from their shoot, and we even used some of their crew on ours."
After a half an hour, our time is up and we thank Gil for his movie and his time with us. This is one Spanish filmmaker whom I hope will get behind a camera again soon. He will certainly continue screenwriting, but on the basis of Nobody Knows Anybody and Blackthorn, he has a good command of directing, as well.
