Writer-director Ti West makes it easy to root for him because he keeps getting better as a filmmaker and storyteller. Taking CABIN FEVER 2 out of the equation, he got his first bit of genuine attention with 2009’s genuinely creepy THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, followed two years later with the alternate take on the haunted house genre THE INNKEEPERS. After dabbling in anthology horror with V/H/S and THE ABCs OF DEATH, he returned with his take on the Jonestown massacre, in 2013’s faux “Vice” episode THE SACRAMENT. In an around his features, West has also done episodic television with episodes of “Scream,” “South of Hell,” and most recently, two episodes of the most recent season of “Wayward Pines.”
When I sat down with West at the SXSW Film Festival back in March, we were there to discuss his latest, most ambitious, and certainly riskiest work, the old-school Western IN A VALLEY OF VIOLENCE, starring Ethan Hawke, John Travolta, James Ransone, Karen Gillan, Taissa Farmiga, and Jumpy the dog (who might end up being your favorite part of the movie). The film does not skimp on the blood, the vengeance, or many of the tropes that made Westerns so wonderful.
But this being a Ti West film, he comes at these elements from a slightly different angle. But don’t expect any supernatural or other horror elements here; this is a pure and simple story about a bunch of not-so-smart people living in an isolated Western town, itching for a fight. And it’s wonderful, picturesque and loaded with a type of nobility that you don’t get in many modern-set films. With that, please enjoy my talk with Ti West…
Capone: How long have you actually said, “I’m going to make a Western before I die”?
Ti West: When I actually meant it? [laughs]
Capone: Yeah, when you said “This is my goal now.”
TW: When I was at the Venice Film Festival for THE SACRAMENT.
Capone: That recently?
TW: Yeah. It was one of those things when people would ask, “What are you going to do next?” So it’s always good to have something in mind. I feel like THE SACRAMENT, which is a movie that’s so realism oriented, didn’t feel like cinema. It felt like this new media thing that I’m imitating something and trying to find places to put the camera where it seems believable. It was a really cool thing to do, but it felt so far removed from cinema, so I was like, I want to do something that’s very traditionally cinematic, because that’s actually my taste, and I thought “What’s the most of that?” And for me, it’s like “Well, a Western.” And then I was wondered, “Could I pull that off?” I didn’t wonder if I could make it. I never had that feeling, but “Could I find someone to actually finance a Western. I don’t know. I’ve made horror movies, and it will be violent, so maybe.” And so I did an interview at Venice and was like “I think I want to make a Western next, like a Clint Eastwood kind of thing,” and it was just a random thing I said, and then I was like “I should do that.” And then I just tried to figure out how to do it, and now here we are.
Capone: It blows my mind that Jason Blum is a part of this. I know he’s done things other than horror. But how did he get involved with this? You haven’t worked with him before.
TW: No. So Jason had always talked to me about movies he was doing over the years, and there was never quite the right fit for me, mostly because I just want to write my own stuff. He’d have a script, and I liked him, so I’d read it, but it’s unlikely that I’ll want to do it. As someone who writes their own material, I’d happily make some gigantic movie that I didn’t write; I know how to do that. I direct TV shows, and it’s like a totally different job. So if I was going to go do a big Marvel movie, it could be cool, but it’s not like my movie, it’s really their movie.
But to do that on a low-budget level is less appealing to me, because we’re not blowing as much stuff up. So if you’re going to do a low-budget movie, everyone’s struggling and you’re spending two years of your life really being passionate about it, so for me, I would prefer to be all in, so I never quite found the right project with him. It never occurred to me to think of him for the Western until I was trying to think about who I want to be in the Western, and I was thinking about Ethan Hawke, because I’ve always been a fan, and it was right around the time of BEFORE MIDNIGHT. I watched that and thought it was amazing, and it really reminded me how much I like Ethan. I knew that Jason had done two movies with him and they had a friendship, so I went to Jason and was like, “I have an idea for a movie. It’s not really what you typically do, but I think it could be really good.” He was like, “Ethan actually wants to do a Western. I’m going to put you in touch. Go meet Ethan and pitch it to him, and let’s go from there.”
So I went and told Ethan about it. He was like “That sounds great.” He was doing “Macbeth” at Lincoln Center, and I was like “You’re done in three weeks from that play. The night you wrap, I’m going to send you the script. I’m going to go write it, I’ll send it to you, and I you don’t like it’s all good. We had a fun meeting and no big deal, but if you do like it, let’s make this movie. Let’s really make it.” He was like “Alright.” And then I went away. He did “Macbeth,” I wrote a script, I sent it to him, he liked it. And the thing that’s really great about Jason is, there are so many producers who talk about making movies but don’t actually make movies. Jason makes a lot of movies. So credit to them, I said “If you guys like it, all I ask is that we make it.” And we made it.
Capone: Westerns are some of my favorite. I grew up watching them with my dad…
TW: I feel the same way.
Capone: Because it’s a part of my DNA, I never question the code of justice that justifies a guy like this killing so many people for the reason he does. I won’t say what the reason is, but it’s completely acceptable that that is the way it is. I love that Travolta’s character is like, “Can we just step back?”
TW: “Can we just stop?”
Capone: Let’s talk about the humor in it. There’s funny stuff in it. Some of it is the style of the violence, and some of it’s Travolta. You get some of that in the Italian Westerns, but in the straight-up American ones, they’re pretty serious.
TW: I think a lot of it is gallows humor. There are no jokes in the movie, but the kind of people that are coming to this movie and are interested in it have the same sick sense of humor about what’s going on. The plot of the movie was very simple. The movie is not about that. There’s what happens in the movie and what the movie’s about. What happens in the movie is the plot and that’s fine, but that’s just to get to what the movie’s about. And to me, the movie was about how violence affects people, and I wanted to make a movie about all these archetype Western characters that we’re familiar with. Every western the characters is always really prepared to be in a Western, and I wanted to make a movie about all these people in a violent revenge movie when it actually gets really violent are like “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t want to be in this anymore. Now that I’m faced with it, this is terrible.”
In a way, you’re with Ethan the whole movie, and the first half you’re with him, and in the second half even though you’re still with him, he’s kind of the bad guy, because you spend so much time with him. I always thought, bad guys get upset when their friends die too. You don’t often see that in movies in general, but you especially don’t see it in Western, which is so much about the bravado and ego of everyone. Everyone’s always perfect spinning the gun and doing other things. I was like “What would the real people in the Western be like?” The guy outside of the bar who talks shit is never the actual toughest guy. So it’s like, what happens when you play it out? So you take these archetypes, and then you slow burn it, and you stay with it longer than you think and you see how they deal with it.
And then you see someone like Travolta being the older guy, being like “You dumb assholes. You don’t even know what you’ve done, and now I have to deal with it.” So that’s the way violence is affecting him. And then you see the insecure guy—he can’t let it go and keeps making it worse, and there’s the guy who was in a war who knows he’s fucked up and just wants to be somewhere else, but they did something, now he has to respond. Always with violence, it’s a cool thing that everyone thinks about, and as soon as it happens in real life, there’s always the “I really wish we could have avoided that.” Because it’s never a good thing, no matter what it is. Westerns typically fetishize violence—THE UNFORGIVEN was the first film to do the opposite of that. But they’ve always fetishized violence as a cool, cinematic thing, and I think that we do that traditionally in this movie, but then we also show you what human beings would actually feel like given the situation, so that’s the charm of the movie.
Capone: The ultimate punk-rock move would have just been having him be like, “I’m just passing through,” and then let him pass through, and the movie’s over. That’s it. It would go against everything we believe in.
TW: Yeah. It’s just like “Don’t be an asshole and let him just go down to Mexico.”
Capone: It’s a great anti-bullying PSA too.
TW: You know what? It is. It does have all that, because it’s about the way bullying affects you after the incident happens. It goes on, it drives people crazy. There is the moment in the movie where Travolta sees the stuff on his horse and is like, “Just go, because I know where this could head, and I don’t want to do that. So how about you just leave?” And it was like, if he just left, the movie could have just been he goes up into the hills, he had a campfire, and the next day he’s in Mexico, and that’s the end of the movie. But he couldn’t let it go.
Capone: I love that scene where Travolta plays the detective, and he’s piecing together where this guy is and where he’s been, and he also acknowledges “If this guy is what I think he is, he’s damaged.”
TW: Exactly. And the same way later in the bathtub scene where he’s just like yelling at his son. He’s like, “You don’t know anything. You didn’t just mess with some dude who’s pissed off. You messed with someone who knows how to kill people. This is a disaster, and he’s probably all fucked up, so like now we have to deal with this, and I know you’re all dip-shits, so we’re not equipped to deal with this.”
Capone: Travolta is almost too smart for the environment. You almost never see the guy who’s that smart and can assess the situation with intelligence in a Western.
TW: I always thought what was interesting is, it’s a town full of dip-shits. It’s a town full of uneducated people.
Capone: Even the women.
TW: Yeah, you see all their agendas. Even like Taissa, who we like, she’s like, “This guy is going whisk me away from here.” And he’s like, “Why do you think I’m going to do that? I don’t even know you.” Again, it’s the archetype of her thinking “I’m good, and you’re good and we’ll go off.” And he’s like, “But I’m not even good.” In the same way as an audience member, you have an idea of what the protagonist is, the characters in the movie do too, and he’s just like “I’m all fucked up. I just want to get out of there.” I always thing that’s interesting when archetypes don’t do what you expect them to do, because archetypes, especially in genres, are some of my favorite things. I love seeing those—not familiar beats, but just like the stuff that you connect to—cinematically traditional things, then seeing them zig when you think they’re going to zag. To me, it’s like “Now I’m really interested in where this is going,” and if that can relate to people in a way that’s humanistic, that’s what makes me go to movies, and that’s what got me up in the morning to make this movie.
Capone: As someone who sees 400 or 500 movies a year in the theater every year, all I ask is “Surprise me every once in a while.” You can set something up in a way I’m familiar with, but you deconstruct it. Do it in a way that’s interesting.
TW: Culturally as audiences, we’ve become so interested in plot and realism. Those are the two things that are least interesting to me about cinema. You don’t watch a movie twice for the plot. I don’t watch JAWS again to see if they get the shark. You go to listen to them say like, “Black like a doll’s eyes” and the whole thing. It’s those idiosyncratic, textural details of the movie that we connect to, and that’s the art of it. Some people don’t look at books as literature; they just look at them as books. Or people don’t look at film as cinema; they just look at it as entertainment. But when you get down to the stuff that I’m sure has always made people like you and I really connect to it, it’s those things that feel totally, uniquely special. If Travolta wasn’t in this movie, it would never be like that. Or if I didn’t make this movie, it would never be like that. It just wouldn’t exist. That’s what makes me excited about movies.
Capone: In certain ways, you embrace the genre. The opening credit sequence is a brilliant animated short. It’s beautiful. The music is tremendous.
TW: Yeah, watching any movie I make is like hearing my voice on tape. It’s so painful. But because this is the first time we’ve shown it, I poked my head in when like I know what’s about to happen and I hope it gets this reaction. “Okay, it did!” Then I go back out and pace around.
Capone: That’s what I mean. Once the credits started, people were like joyous.
TW: Well, my hope was that I wanted to have an opening scene that set up the whole movie, with Ethan, the dog and the priest, and then those titles and music throughout it all. If you’re not in after that, you’re never going to be. But chances are by the end of those titles, if you’re like me, you’re like “I’m down to see where this goes,” because I’m setting it up to be like “This is the kind of movie you’re in right now, and it’s a movie movie with a big, bombastic score, big over-the-top titles, the whole thing,” where you feel like you’re in good hands. This movie could go anywhere. I just like hope you’re along for the ride.
Capone: Let’s talk about the dog, because I’ve never seen an animal actor like that.
TW: I hope sometime down the road you actually get to meet and potentially interview Jumpy, because it is a magical experience. Everything he does in the movie is so tame compared to what Jumpy can actually do, but I couldn’t put any of it in. He can walk across the street on his back legs and open the saloon doors with his paws, but I can’t put that in the movie. When he wraps himself in the blanket, that’s as far as I could go without losing everybody. I wrote a movie about a guy with a dog, and then was like “What have I done?” Then I went on YouTube and I found this dog, and we tracked him down, and he ended up being in L.A. which was amazing. I thought he was going to be just some random person, and then I met him and Jumpy and I was like “We have a hit on our hands. We have a movie star in this dog.” There’s nothing quite like everyday on set when you’re waiting for a set up and you’re starting, and you look over, and Jumpy comes walking up ready for a scene. It’ll bring you right back. It’s amazing.
Capone: I’ve always loved Burn Gorman’s face. It’s the face that haunts me in my dreams sometimes. But he’s so perfect in this role of the priest.
TW: He’s amazing.
Capone: But you kind of book end the film with him, and I knew he’d come back.
TW: It’s great when you hear people laugh when it cuts to him coming back into town. That’s always a nice reaction. I don't think people know why they’re reacting to it, but there’s some structural element that it’s like “I like this guy,” even though he’s not even a good guy. But there’s a weird like “The movie must be ending” moment. It’s a fun moment.
Capone: What’s the significance of bringing him back? It’s a completely different world for everybody else at that point. Why did you want to bring him back into it?
TW: Well, he’s the one outside variable of the movie—outside of the situation. From setting it up at the very beginning, he sets up the tone of the movie as this like priest that’s maybe not everything he talks about and is supposed to be all about. And you’re like “Maybe this guy’s full of shit,” which is kind of everybody in the movie, including Ethan. So he in a way represents everybody faking it, and everybody pretending to be a hero, pretending to be a bad ass. There’s a little bit of cynicism by doing it with religion also, and maybe there’s some commentary to that as well, but I just felt like that being this one outside element as the movie progressed, and seeing how it relates to him and how I felt like it was relating to the audience as well.
He was weirdly this moral, but immoral, center of the movie; he’s almost the narrator in a way, so I wanted to have that strange element where every time he shows up, there’s a new chapter of the movie. We meet him in the beginning, and then we go off with Ethan. And then Ethan leaves town, we meet him again, and Ethan’s going to do something else then. Then Ethan comes in at the end, and now it’s up to them like, what’s your future going to be like? Is it going to be now he’s this great person and everyone’s happy? Probably not. But these are the crossroads of when he comes back and sees how violent everything got, does that make him start to think about it and be a better person? Or is he still just looking for women and whiskey?
Capone: I bet at the point at the end when we see him, he’s feeling lucky he’s alive.
TW: I think so, yeah. I think also, the way violence affects people is different, so every single person in this movie, the violence affects differently. All the bad guys, some get off on it, some are now terrified of it, some are like “I have a wife and kids. I’m sorry about the dog, but can you take it down a notch?” You’ve got the way it impacts the priest. And I just think it’s interesting to see morally how different people are affected by different things. So some of the violence in the movie is horrifically violent and upsetting, and then some of it is funny in a gallows humor kind of way. But it depends on who’s dealing with the violence at that time. But you’re right, he’s probably like “Phew. I dodged a bullet.”
Capone: Are you excited for the current state of westerns right now? Because I feel like the HATEFUL EIGHT, MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, BONE TOMAHAWK, and there was this movie last year, SLOW WEST that I though was great.
TW: And then “Westworld” is going to be on HBO.
Capone: Right. I hesitate to use the word resurgence, because I don’t think it’s strong enough for that, but do you think the right people are taking the reigns on the few things that are actually getting made?
TW: I hope so. BONE TOMAHAWK is one of those weird movies that no one knew existed, then everyone started talking about it, and I was like “How does everyone know about this movie?” People I think like Westerns, but people who invest in movies typically think that people are not, so it’s not something that commonly happens. So it’s great to see that. I’m happy to ride the wave of it. I’m tired of movies about people in cubicles. “Oh, what’s this lead character do? He works at an add agency?” Take me out to some place in America, and show me Americans in American settings doing American movies and let me feel it be cinema.
I loved HATEFUL EIGHT. It was one of my favorite movies last year. I saw it like three times. I saw it on 70mm. I did all of it. The whole experience was absolutely worth it for me, and it felt like a movie. A lot of things now, they don’t feel like movies. They kind of look like movies and theyound like movies, but they don’t feel like movies, in a way that there isn’t a reverence for cinema right now. It’s escapism only, and I think the Western is such an old-fashioned genre that it only really works as a, not so much long form, but you have to respect it and watch it. And I think it’s cool to see that. I hope MAGNIFICENT SEVEN is awesome. I would love to see more Westerns. It’s an aesthetic that I really enjoy. I think it’s a great way to make visually interesting movies about interesting content and uniquely American stuff as well.
Capone: So I’ll ask a question that I already know you’re prepared for, which is do you know what you’re doing next?
TW: Like everybody, I created a TV series, and that’s really close to happening, so that would probably take over my entire life. I also wrote—and I don’t have a preference over the TV series or this—a 1960s, LSD hippie movie. An EASY RIDER/PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK kind of thing called FAR OUT. Like the Western, no one’s really making those kind of movies, but I love those movies. I love movies from the ’60s. I love the Roger Corman-era stuff, but I also love the, for the lack of a better term, arty, Monte Hellman-era stuff. It does seem crazy in 2016 to make a movie that’s a hippie movie a la TWO-LANE BLACKTOP or something, but if I don’t, what am I going to do with myself? I know the uphill battle I face with these things, but I also know there’s a kind of cinema there that’s really important to me that I would love to do. So hopefully I make FAR OUT. It’s a weird, weird, weird, weird movie.
Capone: Is the TV series horror?
TW: The TV series is horror. Horror, I’m a little burnt out on. Not that I’m above it or over it, but you make so many in a row and you run out of things to say. So I don’t have a strong desire to make another horror movie unless the idea just comes to me like “I’ve got to do it,” and I have one De Palma-ish thing in mind, but like in general I want to not make a horror movie. But a TV series that’s long form is more appealing to me, because to me, if you’ve seen any of my movies, the horror stuff is all there and I think it’s effective, but it’s not what I care most about in a movie; it’s the contrast.
So in a long-form TV show, I get a little bit of leeway on the slow burn thing where I can go off on tangents, but also I feel like on TV, there’s never been a scary show. There’s been genre shows, but they’re not scary. So I have a weird chip on my shoulder in that I don’t want to make horror movies anymore, but rather than make all these personal horror movies, what if I just made a TV show that my only goal is to make like a mic-drop, super fucking scary, super controversial, talked-about TV show. So as a challenge, I’m interested in that. If I’m going to do it and it’s a satanic thing, I want to do it with people who are like—what I told everyone is “I don’t want to be soft.” My issue with all these shows on TV, it doesn’t make sense that “Girls” is more controversial than all the horror shows on TV. That should not be scarier.
Capone: Great. Thanks so much, Ti. Good to see you again.
