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Q&A with Kevin Costner, Luke Wilson, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone and Ella Hunt

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1.

What draws you back to these Western stories? What is it like when you develop a project over the course of many years, as you’ve done here?
Kevin Costner: I think it’s the idea that this world we’re showing is not a part of Disneyland: it was part of our history. It was 200, 300 years of struggle. We can get across the country now in a plane—have a meal, watch a movie, take a nap, secure our seatbelt for landing. This was… it was so different back then. The struggle was so great. And it’s an opportunity to explore the literature of how women had to exist with men who drug them out there often without them wanting to be there.

Why are we out here? Why? It was the big question. It was just the promise of America that if you could go, if you were resourceful enough, if you were tough enough, if you just… if your dream was big enough, that you were going to realize them no matter what. And you could hold on to it: it would be yours. It just never dealt with the other side of the coin, which is where people have been for thousands of years, and the collision, the cataclysmic thing that happened when two cultures met.

It was an unfair fight. They didn’t stand a chance. But for 200 years, they did… Before sheer numbers would overwhelm them. Technology would overwhelm them. They fought for their way of life. And there’s a big difference about their anger versus ours. They weren’t fighting for a flag. They were fighting for their neighbor that slept next to them, for their religion, for their children. We were fighting for something that somebody promised us in Chicago that this was land and we could… you could have a home here.

Let the story be the star

The character of Ellen Harvey feels like one we really haven’t seen before. Jena, can you talk about your approach to her?
Jena Malone: Well, a script is sort of this beautiful DNA for a character, you know, and you’re sort of getting to work and sweating and breathing and building it into existence.

And it’s a really lovely gift of an opportunity, when a script has not only authentic, interesting characters, but also truth and lyricism. Things that lift. We don’t know all of the stories of the women that lived in these times, but we also maybe have inherited some of their trauma, you know? Like there might actually be parts of them still living today inside of us, you know, right here with us in this room, you know?

And so I felt very connected to her, and I wanted to step into and dive into her as deeply as I could, and Kevin allowed that. Because it felt like a… a healing space. You know, and I’ve done a few period pieces, and this felt different to me. It felt like I was accessing a true thing that happened. I don’t mean that my character was a real person; I don’t know, I don’t think she was. But it felt like a really healing experience, for me.

Sam, when we meet your character, it’s a beautiful sequence because you’re on horseback and you’re trying to reason. You’re trying so hard… but you’re coming up against the realities of being a lieutenant.
Sam Worthington: That’s right. I think every character on the front is trying to forge their own way and believe in their own path. I think that’s what this script’s creating, these characters that hope they can find somewhere to settle. Whether they’re in the military, or in the wagon train, or they’re one of the hunters, or one of the indigenous. But I think that even the indigenous to some extent are trying to find a bit of peace themselves.

They don’t know who these strangers are, you know, to use strange words. But it’s, I think, out of that search for hope they’re always going to hit these obstacles. The catalyst for drama is conflict. The great thing about the script that Kevin offered us was that this idea that it kind of elevated, it wasn’t just a fight that we’ve seen a million times before in westerns or in films where it’s straight one on one.

His script does a beautiful job of showing how the arguments can go around each other, like they’re dancers, that’s what these scenes were. It’s kind of interesting to play these scenes in a 2024 context, because there’s an… I wouldn’t say old fashioned, and I don’t mean that with any disrespect, but there is a romantic quality to when you’re doing these scenes. The scene of Kevin going up the hill, that’s essentially a romantic scene between these two killers, and we know what’s coming, and we’re just waiting for that button, but it’s a dance between these two men. And that whole script was built like that. I think that’s what I found very unique about it. There’s a poetry to it that I haven’t seen ever put on screen, and least of all in a Western.

The characters in this film feel seem as though they’re still trying to figure out what, exactly, their responsibilities are. Van Weyden, for instance, is almost a reluctant leader.
Luke Wilson: Yeah, I mean, one of the original things that Kevin told me when he hired me was that he didn’t want it to be a black hat and a white hat western. He didn’t want there to be clean lines between who was good and bad, and that’s something I kept in mind. Another thing Kevin told me at the beginning was that the town of Horizon is a lie… and I just thought that was such a cool idea, that this town that everybody’s banking on doesn’t actually exist.

I mean, it reminded me kind of elements of Chinatown: like, there is no Chinatown for J.J. Gittes. It’s just this kind of idea. In the scene where I get introduced, I’m talking about a young kid who has given a horse too much water, and how he can make the horse sick, doing that. It’s just interesting things like that, that you might take for granted. And also going back to what Sam was talking about, how Kevin would add in small things, like he added in a thing about “he’s just helping my daughter into the back of a wagon.”

It was a scene that wasn’t written, and we just kind of popped it off. Just these little elements that help, you know, of course they help me as an actor, but I also think they help an audience kind of get a sense of who somebody is. And, yeah, in terms of being the captain of the wagon train, I say to Ella’s character that it’s not a job I wanted, and I feel sick and burdened that, you know, I was elected to this job. You know, I didn’t run for it like I’m running for office. I got voted in by the other pioneers to take this job.

Ella Hunt: I think I was really drawn to playing this woman who on the face of it is a little bit unpalatable and difficult to like. When we meet her, she seems like such a product of her upbringing and so at odds with the West. She’s in this incredible yellow gown that Lisa Lovaas, our amazing costume designer, has constructed, that she ends up wearing it for the entirety of basically both movies. But, yeah, I was really drawn to that, although on the face of it she is forthright and protective of her husband even though he doesn’t understand the rules of the wagon train, and even though she’s also a woman who has probably been convinced by her thoroughly naive husband to travel west.

She has no idea about the journey they face. And at the end of the day, she just wants to wash it all off, and she can’t wash off the struggle of this journey. And we have this scene that ends kind of tragically with her bathing, but Kevin and I talked a lot about the beauty of the scene too, and the power of seeing this kind of prolonged moment of her allowing herself the time to try to wash off the place that she’s in. And she can’t, but it’s this beautiful moment until it’s ruined by the reality of the journey west and what the west is for people. That’s the truth of these movies and that’s just like scratching the surface of Juliet’s journey. It’s kind of all downhill from there.

How did you select your Director of Photography? It seems like a real challenge, given the scope of the project, and the scope of what is actually shown on screen.
KC: I’m really glad you asked that question for a couple of reasons. And I want the cast to hear this too, because maybe it’s never been articulated. It took me 106 days to shoot Dances with Wolves. And about 113 for Wyatt Earp. I shot Horizon in 52 days. Arguably as big as both of those movies. And so, how did I pick? I picked a DP who had enough confidence in themselves not to be put off when I said, “you’re not going to be able to wait for the light. We’re going to depend on our story.” So in a way, some of their art was going to be sacrificed. Meaning, even though he could do what the other guys do if he had the time, we just didn’t have that same time. I said, “we’re going to depend on our story, Jimmy.” [J. Michael Muro]. And he was my steadicam guy in Field of Dreams. And he was a steadicam guy in Dances with Wolves.

And I gave him his first DP job in Open Range. So, I needed a person who loved his art, but was willing to protect the story just as much. So he sacrificed something as a DP. But his imagery stood out. It didn’t become so precious. I said, we’re gonna film this and I’m gonna take you to beautiful locations.

Let the story be the star. I will give you as much as I can. But he didn’t have nearly the tools that you’ll see a lot of DPs have. He was out there and he was inventive.

Q&A with Annie Baker, Julianne Nicholson, and Zoe Ziegler

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Janet Planet.

Annie, I know your work primarily as a playwright, and I was surprised to learn that you’ve been thinking about making movies for a very long time. Why did you decide to set this story on screen and not on stage?
Annie Baker: It’s never like an intellectual decision. For me it’s very instinct-driven. What is a play and what is a movie? I think I could come up with a lot of reasons. For one thing, getting this performance from somebody [Zoe Ziegler] that was ten when we shot this movie… I don’t know if any ten-year-old on the planet— even this genius ten-year-old—could do that every night for eight weeks. But that’s not why it’s not a play. It’s just a movie.

Julianne Nicholson: I think part of it is just visually this particular place that Annie chose, and an understanding of this place. You cannot create that. You have to be in the place.

AB: Absolutely. There’s nothing I like less than nature on stage being made to look realistic. That’s not to say there aren’t ways of representing nature on stage. It can be interesting and kind of abstract, but that’s not the same as pretending something’s real and alive. Anything on stage is wonderfully dead. Julianne’s right. One of the first things I knew was that this movie was about this place. I knew we had to shoot it in the place. Julianne and I are both from that place. That was baked in from the beginning.

every relationship has its own really particular set of rules

Was it challenging to try to get into the mind of an 11-year-old while you were writing?
AB: I don’t think I was trying to get into her mind. Part of the originating impulse was a movie about the intellectual and spiritual development of someone that age over the course of the summer. In some ways, the movie is her brain changing over a summer. Writing for this character was actually one of the things that made me want to do it. I was trying to capture a feeling that I’ve had. I’ve spent a lot of time with kids, taking care of kids, I’ve had a lot of kids in my life, and there’s a feeling I got from them that I felt like I hadn’t seen captured on screen before, especially for girls. I felt like movies about girls were often about trauma or puberty or burgeoning sexuality. Those are all are great topics, but I wanted this to be about a young girl and her mind and her mind in relationship to her mother.

Zoe, it’s such a wonderful performance. I read that you had never acted professionally before. You’re in almost every scene in the film!
Zoe Ziegler: That’s right.

That’s incredible. What made you want to try acting?
ZZ: One of the parents at our school—her daughter’s an actor—they sent it to my mom and said I would be perfect for it.

What would you say was your first impression of acting? Was it fun or scary or interesting?
ZZ: It was really fun. I liked memorizing the lines.

You also had the pleasure of acting beside Julianne Nicholson. Julianne, can you talk about Janet and what intrigued you about her as a character?
JN: The first thing to know is that I’m a really big fan of Annie’s work, so I was interested in anything that she was putting on the page. And I grew up in that area. When we met, I didn’t know that this was the story, or where it was going to take place. It just felt like such a gift to be able to read this thing that was so reminiscent of my childhood and so familiar. I had such a deep connection from the first page, and to dig into that with Annie was such a lucky thing for me.

The connection between Janet and her daughter Lacy is intense. I experienced such conflicting feelings about it while watching the film. I’m curious what you might have thought about their relationship?
JN: I feel like parenting in 2024 is very different than parenting was in 1991 and that’s something that Annie and I talked about a lot. Sometimes, I, Julianne, would have this sort of inclination to be nicer or more physical or warmer. But it was very important to establish this particular relationship. Not my relationship with Zoe, but this world that we were spinning. My mother and father split up when I was seven, and there was about a year where my mom and my younger sister and I were all very close. We got kicked out of the apartment that we were living in because the landlords didn’t want a single mom living in their apartment in 1977. We were a tight little threesome and we lived in this communal house in Newton and we had really interesting experiences. I’m intrigued by the relationship between a single mom and a daughter. I think it’s so interesting and beautiful and of course each one is different, but those lines are blurry. I think it’s really fascinating. And I believe there is some value in not helicopter parenting and not clearing the path for your kid, but letting them sort of try to figure stuff out on their own and fail on their own.

AB: Listening to you talk, I feel like we’re really accepting of the nuances and ambiguities of romantic relationships on screen. Like if you watch a romance, you’re willing to witness a lot of darkness, and redemption, and also sometimes nastiness. I feel like that’s its own genre. But with parent/child movies, there is this need to sort of come down on the idea that they’re either a good parent or they’re a bad parent. And the movie must have an ethical standpoint on the parenting because, like Julianne was saying, parenting is a culture unto itself now. To me, parenting is just a relationship. And there are things about it that are incredibly beautiful, and things that are kind of weird, but every relationship has its own particular set of rules. And that was part of what I wanted to do—to show that this is a relationship like no other and it has its own set of rules. That’s part of what we’re understanding over the course of the movie. There’s no parenting lesson to take away from it.  

I know it was a short shoot and you all didn’t have a lot of rehearsal time, but did you have any time to get know each other prior to the shoot?
JN: We met briefly in New York when we first did the scenes together. We also had a little time in Massachusetts, where I got in touch with Zoe’s lovely mom. When I’m working with younger actors, I like to start a relationship before we show up on set. So we texted a bit and Zoe really likes horses so I sent her a sweatshirt with a horse on it and I brought Uno—which I don’t think you had ever played, Zoe, and we obsessively played Uno together. We fast-tracked our relationship, which felt fun and easy. I also feel like something happens when the camera’s rolling between Janet and Lacy that you can’t predict or prepare for, and you’re really lucky when it happens.

I have a question about the writing process. The three-part structure is clear in the film, but I’m curious about how you flesh out your characters with a lot of little details. That scene of Zoe smearing her hair on the shower wall is so distinctive.
AB: The hair thing was really hard to pull off, by the way! Zoe was a champ. My first AD is like in the shower with her, passing her a clump of hair. First, we tried to have it in her hair, but it kept falling out. Do you remember this, Zoe?

ZZ: Yeah [laughs].

AB: Also, you had an allergic reaction to the St. Ives shampoo. But it had to be St. Ives! Laura Klein, our AD, was throwing clumps of Zoe’s own hair at Zoe. Zoe, you were amazing. It was one of those things, where you’re like, oh, we’ll get this done in five minutes. And we’ll get to spend two hours on this other thing. But then the clump happened. It felt like, we’re not gonna get it, we’re not gonna get it. And then we got it! Sorry, your question…

Do these character flourishes develop over time—are they fleshed out with numerous drafts or are they there from the beginning?
AB: I take a lot of notes before I start writing on every project. And a lot of the notes that I take are imagistic. You could call them character details, or you could just call them images—like when someone tucks their hand on the wall or something. Usually like 90 percent of them don’t even end up in the play or the movie. But in that process, I have gathered thousands of details. They don’t necessarily have a purpose in the story. I usually have a document with a million images and details and ideas, and then as I draft, I can pull from it. I think that’s usually how I work.

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Q&A with Kai Höss, Maya Lasker-Wallfisch, Wendy Robbins, and Daniela Völker

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Commandant’s Shadow.

Maya, I understand that the seed of the idea for this film originated with you?
Maya Lasker-Wallfisch: Yes: I wrote a book, which was apparently interesting! And one of the things I wrote about in the book were two themes that really interested Daniela. And so Daniela and I were connected through a mutual person that we both knew. And it turned out she was very interested in the things that I was interested in. And so at that time I was talking about my decision to go and live in Germany, as well as my interest in working with children of perpetrators, and absolutely recognizing the burden, the enormous burden, that exists there. So we kind of began an odyssey and Daniela obviously did everything that had to be done, and a million things more, but we were on a mission.

I wanted to see his heart pricked, I think, now that he’s in his 80’s

Daniela Volker: I think it was a coming together of common interests and trying to develop those themes, because Maya’s book was very much focused on her own life, and her experiences of transgenerational trauma as daughter of a Holocaust survivor, which I think is fascinating and it’s a sort of largely untold story, really, while Holocaust survivors are still alive.

Quite rightly, we focus on those survivors, but I thought it was interesting to look at Maya’s mother, at her experiences, and what it was like for Maya to be raised by a survivor. And then I, I thought, well, Anita had been at Auschwitz, so I found out that the commandant of Auschwitz had written a book… and it was extraordinary. He really was in a very unique position, because he was the prime witness and perpetrator at the same time, which is very unusual, and he wrote it all down before he was executed.

Then I found he had descendants, so I met Kai first, and Kai’s story and Maya’s story on opposite sides were in a way quite similar. You know, they were both about coming to terms with what happened in the past to your family. It then became a much broader story.

And I think, in a way, I hope that’s what our film does. It looks at individual stories that come together, piece together, and tell a much broader story about the past, the present, and hopefully the future, really. Because, you know, if your mother has it in her to meet the son of the Commandant of Auschwitz…That should make everyone think, “what can I do to make things better?”

MLW: I would agree. And I think that one of the central factors for me, about why I wanted to do this and all the things that I’ve done consequently and subsequently, was my mother’s work. Her work and her mission in life (once she came to terms with Germany, which she absolutely has), was to help the people talk to each other.

And I really wanted to continue the legacy and to try to do the best I can, because I had been handed the responsibility, which is a kind of awesome one. So when this opportunity came up… it was like it was meant to be. And I was able to be instrumental in creating a situation, obviously with Daniela and with the Höss family, to go on this journey and for my mother to receive us so beautifully and so voraciously and so honestly, and it was the most powerful example of of the capacity to take another look— to not hate, and I think she should win the Pulitzer Peace Prize, quite frankly!

Wendy Robbins: Well, it was quite a momentous evening, quite a momentous event, as Anita said, “this is a historic moment,” and Kai’s father, Hans Jürgen, said, “who would have thought?” And I was always interested in knowing: For Kai and Maya and Daniela, so what was it like the night before? Because obviously Maya had invited the Höss family to come to her mother’s house. And sometimes we’re never quite sure what mood Anita might be in: she’s almost 100 years old! And Kai… traveling in the car with your father to meet her… What were you, what were your expectations? What were you feeling just before you met Anita?

Kai Höss: I was just looking forward to giving this lady a hug, a sweet lady, you know, and I just… over the course of many years, growing up and, you know, finding out as a teenager who I was, I found out about my family, and about my grandfather. There was shame, but, again, when I read my grandfather’s memoirs… I felt the sadness for what he had done to all those people. Millions of people he hurt. Families and this shadow, right? It’s just down the ages, generations. And, for eighty years it’s been hurting people, on both sides. The victims, most importantly, but also the descendants of the perpetrators. We didn’t speak about it, when I was growing up.

And when I read that book, and when I found out at school, I asked my parents, “is that our name?” And, um, my mom said, “yes.” I said, “no.” And it put this whole topic in a completely different perspective for me. But I always felt very sad. And then, in my heart, I wanted to meet Jewish people. I wanted to tell them, I guess, “I’m sorry, I love you and if I could make it right and turn it around, I would.” And so that’s how I kind of went through life. And the day before, the day before going to see her, I was just thrilled. I was thankful. I was very thankful to actually have the honor to meet her.

And in her house, somehow she wants to meet us. She allows us to come to her home. All the pain our family caused her family. And when she opened the door, when we walked in, she was just so sweet. I just really enjoyed that very, very much. And I was thankful that that happened.

Wendy, when and how did you become involved in this project?.
WR: It’s actually an extraordinary story. Because I had worked with Daniela twenty five years before in India. And we then didn’t see each other or speak to each other again.

And I had gone to see somebody in London to discuss a different project, and on the way out the door he did a little throwaway line. He said, “oh by the way, my late father was very interested in the Holocaust and believed in constantly talking about it. If ever you come across an idea that’s a really special idea about the Holocaust, do please come back to me. I might be able to help fund it.” A few weeks later, I get a random call from Daniela, who I hadn’t spoken to for twenty five years, and she said, “I’ve been on this incredible journey for three years. I’m not sure what to do with this now. Can I send you what I’ve shot and the synopsis and see what you think?” And when I opened her link, I watched what she filmed and read her synopsis, and I got a goosebump moment. One of those very rare moments in life where you just think, “this is really special. This is really something.“ And the rest is history, and here we are today.

DV: It’s almost shameful: it’s so hard to get a film like this financed. You know, people think of the Second World War. They think of history films, newsreel experts… I had a film where four real people do things. We followed them, so that didn’t fit the conception of a World War film. You know, people tell me it’s not a history film. But it’s also not a reality film. It didn’t fit any genre. And I started doing this project actually in lockdown, then I started working again. I make documentaries for broadcast and streamers in my day job. So this film was in a way my hobby. I worked on weekends, evenings, and holidays. By the time I contacted Wendy, I was getting really desperate because I had no time, really. You know, it’s a full-time job, to raise money. I already had a full-time job! Anita and also Hans Jürgen (Kai’s father) weren’t getting any younger. And in fact, Hans Jürgen’s sister, she died shortly after we found her. So I felt, you know, this is our last chance. That was at the forefront of my mind. So I was going through my address book and Wendy’s name came up and I just thought, “I wonder…” I mean we hadn’t really seen each other for so long, but I just… I don’t know why, but I called her!

WR: But do you know what? This film has been so full of those serendipitous moments. So for example, we were directed, once we realized we could really do something with this, we were directed to another executive producer called Danny Cohen. And when we were talking through it with him, he almost went white and he said, “but I’m doing a film called ‘The Zone of Interest’ with a director called Johnathan Glazer.’ These children are still alive?” Yes they’re still alive and we’ve filmed them. And that was an extraordinary moment and obviously for this film.

Kai, when you were taking your father through this journey, what did you feel you had to do, in order to protect him in a certain way? He is your father, after all.
KH: You know, it was mentioned that we never really talked much about my grandfather or what he had done in our family. So it was suppressed on a subconscious level for the most part. What I wanted from my dad, what I wanted to see… I wanted to see his heart pricked, I think, now that he’s in his 80’s. I wanted to see his expression. And I saw it in Auschwitz. I encouraged him from the very start, and I encouraged him to come along on this journey… and he was very surprised I had asked – he was okay with it right from the start. We wanted to, you know, get this out, and this is an amazing opportunity.

So when I saw my dad in Auschwitz, and I saw his countenance, his face and his demeanor, and just heard his words… I realized it hit home. He was deeply touched, and there was remorse. I saw that, and he couldn’t— it was his first time. He’d never seen this before. He remembers his childhood in that little island of sanity and beauty and the gardens and where he lived and all that he did. He said he was destined to have that beautiful childhood. What he saw on the other side of the fence, I think it broke his heart that day, and it broke mine. I mean, that whole week I was, I don’t know how many times, just in tears.

Q&A with Viggo Mortensen and Vicky Krieps

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of The Dead Don’t Hurt.

What was the process of getting in sync with each other? Was there a lot of workshopping or did you wait until the outset to really work out the scenes?
Viggo Mortensen: I don’t think we workshopped anything. When Vicky was doing something that worked really well, I didn’t say much of anything. But when I had a different thought or wanted to try something different, I would say something. But mostly, I thought she always understood the character really well, which was great.

Vicky Krieps: Yeah, I think he trusted me. There’s wasn’t much talking about it really. I mean I was talking, but not like, what do you think she feels? Viggo was trusting me to understand her as a woman, really from the inside. So that’s what I did.

VM: The first time you read it we talked about it a little bit, but it was clear from the beginning that you had a strong idea of who she was and it made sense to me. Then you just prepared and came ready to play.

she’s really holding on in the movie

Viggo, did your relationship change to actors after you started directing?
VM: No, I’ve always been interested in actors. I like them. I don’t think being an actor automatically makes you helpful to other actors. It depends what kind of actor you’ve been. If you’re an actor that stays in the trailer—you show up and memorize and you know that on the third line in this scene there will be a tear coming from your left eye. If you’re like that, you may be polite when the director says, well, I would rather the tear came out of the right eye. And you go, oh, that’s interesting. Okay, thank you, I’ll try. Of course you don’t do it. If  you’re that kind of actor, you might not be very helpful when it comes time to directing, if you’re even interested in directing, because you’ve never shown much interest in what the other actors are doing. But if you’re an actor like Vicky, who’s interested in talking to people and is interested in what her partners are doing, then you probably can be helpful to other actors, because you are adapting to different kinds of actors.

There are some really strong themes here. You have the imagery of the saint, you have the imagery of the knighthood, and all the characters in this movie live in some kind of area in between.
VK: Viggo wrote the script not thinking of me, but thinking of his mother. When I received the script, I had—that very same week— been thinking about doing a western, just like that. Because I was in Arizona doing a movie about the border to Mexico. I don’t know why, but somehow, I had this image of being on a horse. And the same week I got the script. From the beginning, there was something surrounding the movie, or maybe the character that felt otherworldly. The connection to Viggo’s mother maybe? Maybe to my grandmother, to the woods, to Joan of Arc. But what are these things, what are these things that make us dream and hope and believe and hold on?  Because she’s really holding on in the movie. So while we didn’t talk about it, it was always there from the beginning. We shot in Vancouver Island. Even though it’s never mentioned in the film, there was a lot of awareness, always, of native people and indigenous people. What is land? Where does this land come from? Who owns this land? Why? And all of these topics are woven into the story even if they’re not clearly talked about. It’s kind of spiritual.

So what was it like finally making a Western? Was it everything you dreamed of?
VK: I really loved it. I mean, I probably suffered the most from everyone because I didn’t get to shoot guns, you know? I was mainly doing what women do—I was carrying the heavy stuff, the emotions. Next time I want to ride more and I also want to shoot some guns.

Viggo, this isn’t your first Western as an actor. Did you draw upon any of those experiences while making this or was that just more in the background?
VM: Not in any conscious way. I didn’t write the story from a starting point that was conceptual or paying homage to any western, not with any model in mind. I just assumed that all the movies I’ve seen, the movies I’ve worked on, and the things that have happened to me in my life influenced me. I’m assuming that nothing in this movie is original. And yet, as far as I know, it all is, you know what I mean? We are always influenced by every breath we take and everything we see.  But I wasn’t consciously thinking about any of it. Rex Peterson, our horse master, who helped us with the horses and the training of riders and stuff, he’s somebody I worked with on both Hidalgo and Appaloosa. That’s the only connective tissue to those stories.

VK: You did have a great knowledge though. Like, you would never accept it if the clothing or decor didn’t look right. That’s because you know, you’ve seen it before. You could tell that there was experience.

Can you talk about composing the film? Was it that you felt you didn’t have enough on your plate? When did you decide to do that?
VM: It wasn’t something I did after or even during the shoot. Almost six months or a year before we started shooting, I had all of it almost recorded. Which sounds kind of backwards, but I had done that on my first movie, sort of by accident, because I was restless. It took four and a half years to raise the money, so in that time, I was like, well, what else can I do? I had the script, I had Lance Henriksen, and I started to imagine it looking at the scenes. It was a form of work, like continuing to write the screenplay in a way. Maybe this scene or maybe this transition needs some music, maybe not, so I’ll try this or that. Then I had most of the music by the time we finally raised the money. I didn’t really play it for anyone, but I had it in mind when we were shooting certain scenes, and that was helpful. In terms of knowing how long the scene should last, and things like that. And then editing it was very helpful. So then I did it intentionally in this movie. And it’s a more complex score, but it really worked. We went with the musicians, and we came up with the right way to play those themes, and what the instrumentation should be, and all that. And then I did share that with the cinematographer, and members of our team, in order to understand certain transitions. It helped especially with some of the scenes that were not linear and in difference time periods. There’s a period where it suddenly moves very quickly from where Vicky is pregnant, and there’s a baby, and there’s a boy, and yeah, it’s like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There’s one piece of music that goes through all that, and it’s helpful. I mean, I don’t like it when the music tells you what to think or what to feel, whether to be scared or happy, or anything. And sometimes it can be counter rhythmized to what you’re seeing, but it somehow complements it. So that’s the idea. It was very helpful in the editing, of course.

The casting is phenomenal across the board. As a member of the Danny Houston fan club, what was it like working him?
VM: I’m a member of that club too. I was really happy that he wanted to play the part. I didn’t say it to him while he was doing the scene because I didn’t want him to be self-conscious, but the scene in the back where he’s speaking with Garrett Dillahunt and he’s quite verbose, at one point, I was just listening without looking. I was listening to his voice, and it sounded eerily like his dad’s. I told him at the end of the shoot. I said, by the way, in that scene… and he goes, oh yeah, I’m not surprised. I’m glad you didn’t mention it at the time. He’s a good sport and he was fun to be around and he did a great job. I mean, we had a great cast. Not intentionally, but there were three alums from Deadwood— W. Earl Brown, Ray McKinnon, and Garrett Dillahunt. We had some really legitimate Western actors in there, and also a mixture of other people. I felt really good about all the characters.

Vicky, what’s it like working an actor that is also a director?
VK: It’s interesting because in almost all the interviews this is the question. So now I’m thinking, do they always ask that? There’s always a question to the actors, how is it working with a director who’s an actor? I’m just me thinking.

We’re contractually obligated to ask it.
VK: It seems to be very interesting to people. But that is also interesting because that means that people think a lot about it. I mean, to come up with that question means that you’re already thinking about what it is like being an actor, and what it is like being a director. It really felt very natural to work together. The only thing is, of course, if you work with someone who’s also being solicited by, let’s say, the light crew or the sound crew or whoever comes talking to him, that will affect me in a way because then his attention suddenly goes off to the camera. I started developing a way to work when I was in a scene and suddenly the other actor went away. The actor was gone! So I had a very intimate relationship to all the decor and the vases and the furniture. Because I had to substitute it with something that felt real and was in the moment. I could hold onto that and I could be in the character and remain in that moment. I love that. It was a great experience and almost like a school of acting.

Q&A with George Miller and Chris Hemsworth

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The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

The Mad Max mythology has been with many of us for our entire lives. Can you talk about bringing Furiosa to the screen, particularly as it relates to the previous film and the way they were, in some sense, created simultaneously?
George Miller: That’s exactly right. The movies made three decades ago really weren’t connected except for the Max character. They were kind of exercises in storytelling, but never connected. This is quite different in that we had the story, as you know, of Furiosa before we shot Fury Road. There’s no other way to tell the story of Fury Road, which happens over such a compressed amount of time; there was no way to get the internal logic of everything, not only of the characters, but of the world and the objects and the costumes and language of that world, unless we really understood it.

So the actors and the cast and the crew and the designers on Fury Road had this story before we launched into that one. And we have a film now, all this time later, that runs directly into Fury Road, as you saw here. So I’m really grateful that the internal logic of this film was apprehended, basically, by people who had seen Fury Road already, and that they were then able to expand on it more in this film.

I’ve come to think that directing is a little bit like being an athletics coach

Part of the mythology is also introducing it to new people. And I’m curious, Chris, what did you think when you first encountered the character of Dr. Dementus, the script, and this world? Because in a lot of ways, this is not only part of our collective mythology, but it’s also a particularly Australian mythology.
Chris Hemsworth: Yes— David Collins, who plays Smeg in the film, summed it up well. He said, “the Americans have Star Wars, the Brits have Harry Potter, and we have Mad Max.”

GM: Says a lot about us!

CH: Exactly— says a lot about us. So, obviously I had grown up watching the Mad Max films and I was inspired in many ways as an actor, but also I thought a lot about the sort of the adventure that the stories had taken me on as a young kid; they were very prominent in my thinking.

I, like many people, saw Fury Road and was blown away. Having worked in the industry at that point for a number of years, I’d seen behind the curtain enough and I understood sort of how the tricks worked. When I first read the Fury Road script, though, I was back in the seat as an audience member and I was truly captivated as a fan and forgot that I was a part of the movie making business. I was a fan again, and I called my agent and said, “I have to work with George in any way, shape or form… I’ll carry coffee to the set if he needs it, just to be on the set.” A few years later this opportunity came up and I read the script and we met at his office in Sydney and spent a couple of hours talking about the world… but mostly about the psychology and the character of Dementus himself, that for many different reasons resonated so loudly with me. And that began the endless discussions and journey into creating the character and finding a window in.

Part of the mythology of every Mad Max is that there is a villain with a potential mentor / mentee relationship. But in this film, the audience really gets to be with the antagonist and his proposed mentee for the first hour of the film. George, can you discuss that choice?
GM: Well, when we first had the character, I had no idea who could play him. Because it was… if it was diving in the Olympics, I had a sense even from the beginning, it was a dive that was the highest degree of difficulty, and I wasn’t sure who could pull it off.

I remember early on we did some concept art of Dementus: he looked nothing like the one we’ve made here, but he did have a teddy bear. And that teddy bear, somehow, was amplified through the story and became significant. The other thing we did in some early concept art was to make him a bit of a showman. A different mode of basically ruling his tribe, as it were, his bike horde, then that of Immortan Joe, who’s a kind of a demigod, kind of deified in some sense. We’ve seen variations on both of those themes throughout history, I believe, and particularly in Dementus, it was all about pageantry: his vehicles, his dress, his language. His behavior is all about that thing that we’ve seen right throughout history. He changes as the story goes on, but to be honest, I had no idea who could play him.

I’ve come to think that directing is a little bit like being an athletics coach. I mean, without going on too long, actors have to be physically athletic, intellectually athletic, and emotionally athletic. And I’ve come to realize in a way that, for me, they’re kind of warrior-like. Warriors of the psyche, I think. And as a director you don’t really know – just as with an athlete – whether they’re going to deliver the goods. You know that they’ve got the innate talent—they’re born with it in some way. And then you get the athlete and they drill and they work and so on, and basically amplify those talents.

And then you get the actors together in a team. And the team has to drill and work. But it’s in the moment of performance, it’s the moment of the game, when they completely surrender all of that, all that preparation, to their instinct. And you don’t know what’s going to happen. And you hope that the game is going to go well, but when you see it, when you’re sitting there, nowadays on the monitor watching it, and quite often you’ll have, you know, more than one camera, and you’re watching it, and you see it there or you more than see it— you feel it, you experience it, and that’s always a great moment for me… and then to see it again and again and again, in the cutting room, and get the same feeling every time.

That’s really, sorry to go on about it, but it’s really interesting to me, like a great bit of music. No matter how often you hear it, you still get that experience. It brings you back into that. That’s when I’m thankful for those moments that we see, because it’s just a wonderful feeling.

In the Mad Max world, characters don’t wear their personal tragedies on their sleeves. Even in Road Warrior, Michael Preston’s character says to Mel Gibson something to the effect of, “you think you’re special because you have someone that you lost? Everybody lost something.” But Dementus is very open about having experienced loss, and he wears it like it is something that’s important to him. Can you talk about building the backstory for Dementus?
CH: You know, I’d had the script for two years and had a lot of different ideas about the character. And different sorts of inspirations. And it wasn’t until about two weeks before shooting that I started to kind of panic because I didn’t quite have a grasp on the character. I knew that he was villainous; I’d logged all my lines at this point, and it was all sort of in there… but I was still kind of uncertain. George suggested that I write some journal entries in character. And… even when he said it, I thought, “oh yeah, okay, maybe…” you know. And I woke up one night (not that I just forget anything George tells me), but I was in this sort of frenzied state of… and I woke up in the middle of the night and just put pen to paper and thought, “just don’t take the pen off the page and just write.”

I closed the book, didn’t think much of it, and then I showed it to George the next day, and I think a lot of it landed for me at that point. The why of who this character was, it was about backstory. It was about his own suffering, his own trauma, and then I had the sort of light bulb moment: there is an arrested development to this guy, you know, through his traumatic experiences, his own abuse, he suffered.

It was a stunted maturity and growth. And so that explained to me the sort of childlike, impulsive, flamboyant actions he takes throughout the film. You know, he’s throwing a tantrum at one minute, and then he’s screaming for attention over here. He’s celebrating over there. I began to understand what he was screaming for, which was his own way of trying to ask for love. You know, it was his own way. He wanted the same thing everyone else wanted. He wanted connection. He wanted to be part of a family. The teddy bear, as you said, it was, it was from an illustration. Then it was in the costume, but it was never discussed in the script what it meant. And we were in the scene where I think I suggested maybe I’d give it to Furiosa in that moment. And, and then it was later I think we added in the line that it had belonged to him.

It interestingly sort of took on a life of its own at that point. It became very symbolic to him for his own reasons. It also becomes symbolic to Furiosa. It also represented a loss of innocence for the entire wasteland. It was something that they’re all searching for.

It had been taken from all of them at one point or another. It was perhaps a prisoner that Furiosa then frees later. It’s interesting trying to sort of, you know, reverse engineer, or go back and remember at what point things kind of came to life, but again, I think not seeing the character as a villain, actually seeing him as a person too, it then it started to make sense: the villain sees himself as a hero just as much as the hero sees himself as a hero.

I think he’s very… the impulse is to say, “he’s just this bad guy.” But once he was a real person to me, I really warmed to him. And now I have to be careful sometimes publicly articulating my compassion for the guy! Because he’s also a savage, obviously. And so I don’t justify any of the things he does, but you understand.

Some people, when abused, take that energy and that past and continue the cycle as he does. Whereas with Furiosa, there’s a revenge in it, but she chooses to exist in a more noble fashion. But for him, it was this excuse: “I’m allowed to treat you this way because that’s how I was treated.”

GM: Can I just say from the coach point of view, the first response that I got was your response to the screenplay. And I thought, “oh my goodness, he… I’ve been working on this for years, and he already seems to understand more than I do.” And then reading that journal, those five pages, I thought, “yes, he’s going deeper!” And then as we were shooting, he used to say, “you know, if there was this relationship with curiosity, if it was clearer…” and as that built through the shoot, basically expressed through the exchange of the teddy bear and all that sort of stuff, I thought, “wow, that thread of the tapestry is much, much stronger than I anticipated it would be.”

And for me, I found that if I have an understanding of not only their character, which is the obligation, but also an understanding of the context of that character and the interaction of that character with others, that’s when it becomes really powerful for me and it’s just like, you know, training some great Olympic gymnast or diver or something like that. It’s just a great feeling. You try to create the space for the actors to work together and then you put them together, and when you see them stick the landing as they say, it’s just a great feeling. I’m very grateful to this film that this happened with all of the cast, particularly when you’re working together. We’re not interested so much in what the individual actor is doing—it’s what they do to each other, or the characters do to each other, that’s really where the drama lies. Anyway, thanks Chris.

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