Taylor Sheridan – Wind River: “My inspiration comes from solitude”

The screenwriter of Sicario and Comancheria directed this very good thriller in 2017.

Article originally published in issue number 473 (September/October 2016) of Première magazine and shared again on the occasion of the rebroadcast of Wind Riveron this Monday Arte.

The film will return in the second part of the evening (at 10:45 p.m. after A man is deadwith Jean-Louis Trintignant), then it will be available for some time in replay, free of charge on the channel's website. Since then, Taylor Sheridan filmed Those Who Wish Me Dead, starring Angelina Jolieand he is obviously developing his western series, Yellowstone.

A new western in the country of oil by Taylor Sheridan: trailer

Ex-cop with a good face Sons of AnarchyTaylor Sheridan became Hollywood's top screenwriter with Sicario. He also wrote the modern western Comancheria. And that's just the beginning.

On the set of Sicarioin New Mexico in the summer of 2014, the actors and director Denis Villeneuve had only one person to compliment. Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan. Who? So far, a supporting role in the series Sons of Anarchy : cop David Hale, nicknamed “Captain America” because of his honesty and his pure American face. Taylor would last two full seasons and would ask showrunner Kurt Sutter to evacuate him in the first episode of season 3, in 2010. Sheridan, who had been a cash cow on American television for fifteen years, Walker, Texas Ranger has NCIS passing by Doctor Quinn Female Physician dreams of becoming a screenwriter and director. He tries unsuccessfully to mount Olympusa pilot where an ex-military secret agent discovers that he is descended from the Greek gods.

“It was too ambitious, too big for a TV channel. But it's a great script, I swear!”he laughs.I wanted to treat this subject in a completely realistic and serious way. The Greek gods and the CIA. It was as serious as it could be.” After other attempts (including a script on the attack on the American embassy in Libya in 2012), Sheridan was spotted by producer Basil Iwanyk, who was used to muscular neo-films (the trilogy Expendables, John Wick). And the script of Comancheriawritten in parallel with Sicariois part of the 2012 selection of the Black List. The list of the best screenplays circulating on the Hollywood market. The jackpot. The screenplay of Sicario will change Sheridan's career for good.

With Wind River, Jeremy Renner finally finds his big role

“The landscape is the character”

Sicario gives the impression that Taylor had understood everything, not only about the writing but about his subject. that he had given us the booklet of the definitive cartel film. The story of a woman of action crushed in a world of violence created and guarded by men; a dark odyssey into the heart of darkness, shot with a scalpel by the camera of Denis Villeneuve. It could have remained a one-shot, a unique shot, but Comancheria confirms Sheridan's writing skills. The balance between punchy lines and meaningful silences; the landscape of the American Southwest that determines the dramaturgy. Taylor has a voice and a style.”In my scripts, I emphasize the landscape. It's a character. I grew up in Texas, and I spent a lot of time alone, outside, contemplating the horizon. That's where my inspiration comes from. From solitude.”

New Frontier

Taylor also wrote Soldierthe continuation of Sicario which the Italian Stefano Sollima will direct (the series Gomorrah, ACAB, Suburra). “There was talk of a sequel before Sicario came out, kind of like that. Soldado focuses on Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin. In Sicario they were fighting under the control of a higher authority. This one doesn't have any. It's the same tone as the first movie, it's not a big brainless action movie even if the scale is bigger, the movie is more expensive.” Rather than a trilogy, should we therefore speak of a tetralogy?I didn't even know the word existed!” he laughs. “What Denis Villeneuve, David Mackenzie and Stefano have in common is that they understood that the violence in my scripts is not gratuitous.”

Villeneuve, Mackenzie and Sollima: it is significant that it is a Canadian, an Englishman and an Italian who are responsible for redrawing the American western on Sheridan's score. That the new frontier is born from the encounter between foreign cameras and a Texan script. Not because America no longer seems to know how to provide great stylists, rather because it seems to require a different and external look at the land of the primal mythology of Yankee cinema. But the territory of Sheridan's cinema is that of 70s cinema, with this redrawn frontier, the violence of the West and the refusal of chromo:

“For me, the 70s are my golden age of cinema. The perfect combination of screenwriters, directors and actors… There is a naturalism and a refusal of melodrama in the films of the 70s and early 80s that inspire me enormously in my writing.”

If Taylor immediately mentions Michael Mann as his main inspiration, we think rather of another Michael, the Cimino of Ducker (1974), already a modern western with Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges as bank robbers. But Sheridan prefers Journey to the End of Hell (1978): “impossible to miss. A small town, characters who create their own morality, the specter of war, the vision of America…”

An American trilogy

Comancheriait's the James brothers of the 2010s, unshaven and clumsy brothers who became robbers because of the economic crisis, to save the family farm. Although tonally different – the darkness of Sicario makes way for lightness – the two films are deeply linked. “These are the first two parts of a trilogy that will end with Wind River, which I am directing. It is an exploration of the new American frontier. What has changed since the nineteenth century, and what has not changed. The trilogy wants to show the consequences of the conquest of the West that we are still suffering today.”

Starring Jeremy Renner as a park ranger and Elizabeth Olsen as an FBI agent, Wind River will be released in 2017 and will be a hunt for a killer in the snow of Utah. “The film concludes both Sicario And Comancheriaand it will be an exploration of family, of poverty, of violence.” Taylor appears in Comancheria as an actor. A cowboy on horseback leading his herd away from a prairie fire. An anachronism, an anomaly in the landscape: “I didn't even know this kind of thing still happened in the 21st century”growls Taylor the cowboy as the flames devour the horizon. Kind of like the emergence of a screenwriter like Sheridan. We didn't know this kind of thing still happened.

The trailer for Wind River :

Taylor Sheridan: “Sicario and Comancheria are the first two parts of a trilogy…”