It begins with a neck being sliced open. “Why do they always wet themselves?” the killer asks his colleague. “Just get on with the task,” comes the weary reply. With that, the tone of Bone Tomahawk is set. A western with horror trimmings, it stars Kurt Russell as Sheriff Hunt, the leader of a squabbling posse searching for the kidnapped wife of Patrick Wilson’s crippled foreman Arthur. Propping up the pair are Richard Jenkins, as the sheriff’s bumbling deputy Chicory, and Lost’s Matthew Fox, as cocksure gunslinger Brooder. It’s a western done properly, but one that has a lot of fun subverting its characters’ masculinity. It’s disturbing too, thanks to the kidnappers: a fictitious indigenous tribe, introduced early as “a spoiled bloodline of inbred animals who rape and eat their own mothers”. It really does get very dark.
The film is an audacious debut by 43-year-old director S Craig Zahler. Raised in Miami, he left for New York to go to film school, and has been there ever since. He has also been incredibly prolific. In the last decade, he has written 40 screenplays and numerous novels, four of which have been published.
Meanwhile, despite as many as 25 of his scripts being optioned by Hollywood, only one became a film, a small horror called Asylum Blackout. Screenplay The Brigands Of Rattleborge, a story about bandits robbing a town in the middle of a thunderstorm got a lot of buzz in 2006: Spielberg wanted to make it; then Oldboy’s Park Chan-wook was attached; then nothing. Another Zahler project called Robotech had Tobey Maguire attached to it; then nothing again. It goes on.
“Half of the A-list has come and gone on different pieces of mine, I’m not exaggerating,” says Zahler on the phone from New York. “At the beginning, the first few years of it, it was pretty crushing. You just get used to it over time.”
Bone Tomahawk is the direct result of this decade of development hell. In 2011, when Zahler sat down to write his fifth western, he did so with the intention of directing it himself. His manager and producer Dallas Sonnier loved the script and committed to getting it made exactly as it was written, telling prospective financiers that no creative notes would be welcome. After that Russell came onboard, then Jenkins, but it was still a struggle; westerns are considered risky, and Zahler hadn’t directed before. And, despite Sonnier’s stipulation, money men wanted changes regardless.
“There were companies willing to come in if we did a much shorter version of the movie,” says Zahler, “and give over all creative control. It wasn’t exciting for me to shoot a 90-minute version that they’d fill with heavy metal. And I say this as a metalhead.”
So Sonnier and Zahler stood their ground. Eventually, after Sonnier paid for half of it himself, final funds came through from UK company The Fyzz Facility, and they were off, albeit stretched: they had a $1.8m budget – tiny, considering what needed to be filmed – and a tight 21 days. But thanks to Zahler’s obsessive attention to period detail and the arid scenery of the Santa Monica Mountains, you feel like you’re out there with them, dragging yourself along in the heat.
It may not be autobiographical, but there’s a lot of Zahler in Bone Tomahawk. “I put bits of myself all over the place,” he says. “Most characters I write have some attributes in common with me, and some attributes that are not. Certainly when Brooder says: ‘Smart men don’t get married’, everyone who knows me is thinking of me. ‘That’s something Zahler would say.’” Really? “Yeah, I’m not married and don’t have any interest in it.”
Clearly, Zahler cuts to the chase, and is rapidly becoming known in Hollywood for doing just that. Discussing westerns on various podcasts recently, he said The Revenant was the worst film he’s seen in five years. He also had a pop at The Hateful Eight, finding it all too theatrical, which is hardly news for a Tarantino film. Still, he’s not afraid to say what he thinks of other people’s work, is he? “Nope!”
It’s refreshing, considering today’s publicity-controlled world where so many stars’ default pose is one of false modesty and numbing diplomacy. “It’s interesting how afraid people are to say these opinions,” says Zahler. “Me taking this dump on The Revenant, which I think is truly a terrible movie, or having criticisms for Hateful Eight, which I enjoyed, all of it comes from me being a movie fan. I adore movies, and when they’re not good, I think a discussion of why they’re not good promotes thought about the art form.” If something gets his goat, he’ll even write a review on IMDB.
“It’s nice to see a reflection of a different idea where there seems to be a uniform brainwashing,” he says. “I understand that people are worried about backlash, but people who work with me hear these opinions. If they don’t want to deal with someone who’s gonna say he didn’t like a movie when he didn’t like a movie, then they’re probably not gonna be a good fit for me anyway.”
Zahler may be a loose cannon, but his film qualifies his opinions: it delivers. Despite a small US release, word of mouth meant that it made its money back many times over, and Zahler is hoping its reception will get him a bigger budget for his next picture – as long as he retains that all-important creative control.
Financiers should take note: Bone Tomahawk is gleefully ballsy and cool as hell. Show him the money.
Bone Tomahawk is in UK cinemas from Friday 19 February
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