John Maclean was never a hairbrush in front of the bedroom mirror kind of kid so when he joined The Beta Band, he took charge of the visual side of the Scottish art pop four piece’s artwork and music videos. Along the way, then up-and-coming actor Michael Fassbender saw The Beta Band’s smart, innovative promos and when the band split and Maclean moved into filmmaking, came onboard for the director’s first two short films Man on a Motorcycle and the BAFTA winning Pitch Black Heist.
Now the duo are back for Maclean’s feature length debut, a coolly assured slice of noir cinema called Slow West, which takes tired Western tropes and gives them a fresh European cinema spin, laced with wit and an off beat mood reminiscent of the Coen Brothers. The film follows Jay, a young, upper class 19th century Scot [played by baby faced Kodi Smit-McPhee] who sets off in chase of an unrequited love, Rose, who has fled to Colorado. In the wild west, the innocent Jay is offered protection on the route by Silas [Fassbender], an archetype bad boy who may be doing more than just guiding his young friend across unchartered territory. In its languid, lovingly shot 84 minutes, Slow West muses on young love and resees the Western through migrant’s eyes. Below, Maclean talks through some of the ways he made the West visually and musically come alive again.
Should we call Slow West a Western?
I always find names of everything… it’s for other reasons. Whether something’s punk or soul or something’s arthouse or mainstream, they are all for other purposes. You just have to tell the story. It was definitely more of a Western than anything else.
The film has a really easy pace but is also marked by its brevity, clocking in at 84 minutes. Why did you keep the film brief?
I was thinking a lot about noir or fairytale cinema and I thought the idea was more suited to a fairytale structure so I thought let’s try and keep it shorter. That was always the intention. And because it’s a kind of road movie, the short length counteracts the pace. It manages to keep it from dragging [laughs].
You researched the period through fiction from the time like Little House on the Prairie. Did that help inform the main female character, Rose, who having fled Scotland, is toughing it out in Colorado?
Yes, Little House on the Prairie was informative in that it showed there could be no one sitting around at that time; it was all hands on deck. The women had to do as many chores as the men. It was very much full on survival. I read authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain, books that were around at the time rather than history of the West because a lot of that was myth making. I mixed that with the other element of the film, which was more dreamlike and more influenced by European cinema, the fact that it is a fairytale. So I read fairytales as well.
Where did you get the inspiration for the boy who was perhaps aiming too high in his love interest?
Personal experience [laughs]. I think that was my teenage years; that was the theme.
You wrote the part of Silas for Fassbender. How did that effect how you saw the character?
I was very conscious not to make him the action man or the saviour. I very much thought his character would soften throughout the film. He starts as the archetypal cowboy and the film takes him somewhere else… without spoiling it. It’s Michael’s ability – I don’t know how he does it – even if the first thing you see of his character is him shooting someone else in the head you still sympathise with him somehow.
Kodi, an Australian, nails his Scottish accent. Was his character, Jay, difficult to cast?
A lot of young actors come out of Glasgow with a brogue and a Glasgow roughness and this character was much more posh Scottish. It’s hard no matter where you look to find someone who has got the very timeless beauty in a way. When I saw Kodi he was very close to what I was thinking in the script.
The film recently played in the cinema you worked in as a student. Did that school you in the kind of cinema you’ve ended up making?
That was when I was a student in art school. There was a cinema in Edinburgh called Cameo that did late night double bills. I worked every Friday and Saturday night from midnight to 4am. That’s the first time I saw Once Upon a Time in the West, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Reservoir Dogs – all these films on the big screen. I romanticised it; it wasn’t a job.
Why were you drawn to doing The Beta Band’s visuals?
I’d been to art school and I never wanted to be a singer. I was always thinking art or painting or film. So I jumped at the chance of directing music videos. I never made a music video that was the band playing, cut to action and then band playing. I felt they were trying to be little narratives. Each one was an experience of learning how to edit, working with actors who couldn’t act [laughs], working out how to achieve things without any money.
Slow West is in cinemas from Friday 26th June.
Credits
Text Colin Crummy