By Danny Peary & Erin Free
“We’re trying to make what I call an epic crime thriller,” director, John Hillcoat, tells FilmInk on the Atlanta set of Triple 9. “The action is unpredictable and crazy. The horror of violence is something that we’re not shying away from, but we’re not making it gratuitous. I’ve always tried to not do that.” Never one to recoil from a shotgun blast to the face or a flurry of on-screen fists, Hillcoat has upped the cinematic violence quotient once again with Triple 9. Boasting a top draw cast – Casey Affleck, Aaron Paul, Woody Harrelson, Norman Reedus, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Anthony Mackie, Teresa Palmer, Clifton Collins Jr., Gal Gadot, and Kate Winslet – this hard edged thriller traces the very thin, close-to-snapping line that divides America’s cops and criminals. Set in a hot, broiling Atlanta, and taking in the Russian mob that rules the roost, the Mexican and African-American gangs that do their bidding, and the compromised cops that work with them and against them, Triple 9 (the police code for the shooting of an officer) is not your standard police-and-their-prey procedural, with a rack-it-up style body count.
That is not the kind of movie that Australian-born John Hillcoat makes, and the director speaks with obvious pride about Triple 9’s sense of intense, bristling verisimilitude. It digs deep, and goes right to the core of the criminality that forms much of the bedrock of American society. “We’re relentless on the research,” Hillcoat says. “We actually have two technical advisors on the set today. Some of the cops in the film are real cops, and some of the gang guys are real gang guys. I’m amazed at the cooperation and support that we’ve had, from both sides of the fence. Authenticity is something that they appreciate. [The HBO TV series] The Wire, for instance, was so authentic that both criminals and cops watched and loved the show. We’re telling a narrative story with Triple 9, and there are all sorts of other things going on, but we’ve had a lot of support with the intel, because there’s that allure of movie-making and their desire to contribute. Both the cops and the criminals appreciate something that gets it right.”
When it comes to the highest reaches of those criminal organisations, however, Hillcoat has sensibly kept his distance. “I’ve been talking to people that are dealing with those people, as opposed to talking directly to those people,” the director smiles. “I have a friend who is a documentary filmmaker who gave me a lot of insight into the cartels and how they work, and he has met with a lot of the top narco leaders. There’s a lot of information out there. I’ve talked to DAs investigating the Russian mobsters, but as far as the Russians go, I haven’t personally connected with them. I like to stay behind the camera and live a healthy life.”
On the film’s busy, high-energy set, however, Hillcoat is no distant figure watching it unfold from behind his camera. He’s right in there, with mud on his proverbial boots, and dirt under his fingernails. “It’s really cool working with John,” says actor, Anthony Mackie (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), who plays the duplicitous Marcus, a cop who plays middle man to the gangs and his own colleagues. “A lot of directors want you to do their idea of what the movie is. But John is one of the only directors that I’ve ever worked with who not only incorporates your ideas as an actor, but actually appreciates them. He’s excited about how you can transition your character more into the storyline. And not a lot of directors are able to let go and allow that to happen. He sends you so much to read too! He literally sends you a Dropbox a week of shit to read. He gives you all that information so that you can come up with an individual take on your character, and bring it in and do it the way that you want to do it. It’s a collaborative effort as opposed to a dictatorship. John gives the actors an opportunity to really bring forth the characters and show a three-dimensional character as opposed to just playing an idea, or a sentiment, that would push the plot along. He’s the true definition of a collaborator, and that’s what makes it fun.”
Famed and loved for his indelible work as Jesse Pinkman on TV’s Breaking Bad, actor, Aaron Paul, also credits Hillcoat as a director always open to ideas. “He’s the best,” Paul tells FilmInk between takes. “He’s such a collaborative director. I get a little nervous when I come to work and the director just says, ‘All right, great job, moving on.’ I’m like, ‘Uh, are you sure?’ I like to come to work and be directed. I feel like I need help sometimes. John has a very distinct vision that he comes to the set with for each scene, and he likes to talk to you about it first. And then you throw ideas at him, or bounce ideas off of him, and you just come up with something together. John’s great, and he’s always so positive.”
According to Anthony Mackie, Hillcoat is also working a little of that positivity into the tapestry of the film as well. “It’s not as dark as you would think,” the actor says of Triple 9’s tone. “John Hillcoat has a very distinct way of bringing comedy into a dark place. If you look at his [period crime drama] Lawless, as dark as that movie could have been throughout, there were moments where you chuckled and recognised yourself in those characters. Triple 9 plays along those lines too. It’s definitely more of a character-driven piece too. It’s action-heavy, but the characters are integral to making the plot work…even more so than the plot itself. Because this movie’s so plot-heavy, we have to figure out ways to make our characters three-dimensional, and to make the plot a piece of set dressing as opposed to being the focus of the movie, and our becoming pieces of set dressing.”
Such character driven storytelling has now become John Hillcoat’s trademark. Born in 1961 in Queensland, John Hillcoat was raised in Ontario, Canada, and in Connecticut in the US. “I grew up in the late sixties in New Haven, Connecticut,” the director told Uncut in 2012, hinting at the birthplace of the violence that would eventually take hold in his work. “I’d seen police shoot-outs in front of my eyes, a car chase with the cops leaning out the window firing bullets which sounded more like a cap-gun or a pop-gun…it was very anti-climactic. But the thing that impacted on me as a youth were all the cultural upheavals going on, and things like Martin Luther King’s funeral march, and the repeated black-and-white TV images showing Robert Kennedy’s assassination. In a very short time, all my parents’ heroes had perished and been assassinated violently, from The US President all the way down to rock stars.”
Inspired by such darkness, always creative, and a dabbler in all forms of visual arts, Hillcoat was still a youth when his paintings were featured at The Art Gallery Of Hamilton. He then returned to study in Australia, where he graduated from Melbourne’s prestigious Swinburne Film School. At the age of 26, Hillcoat became the youngest filmmaker to be accepted into The Toronto International Film Festival for his short, The Finger, which he followed up with a number of other shorts, including The Blonde’s Date With Death. At the same time, Hillcoat had also become a fixture on Melbourne’s live music scene, filming shows for the archives of The Crystal Ballroom, one of the city’s seminal punk and post-punk venues. “There was definitely an edge to Melbourne,” Hillcoat told Uncut. “It’s got a real underbelly. There used to be a lot of police corruption, and there’s always been a huge influx of illegal drugs, and with police involvement. That was very much prevalent in our youth.” Hillcoat also started directing music videos, and eventually forged a friendship with one of the scene’s most magnetic figures in the wiry, intimidating form of Nick Cave. Hillcoat and the frontman of The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party, and The Bad Seeds have a personal and professional bond that was born in the late seventies. “It’s been a very close relationship,” Nick Cave told FilmInk in 2012. “We’re very, very good friends. We socialise. Our children play together.”
Hillcoat edited the video clip for The Birthday Party single, “Nick The Stripper”, but he and Cave’s first major creative collaboration was on a much, much bigger project. Along with Gene Conkie, Evan English, and Hugo Race, the pair co-wrote Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead, which would mark Hillcoat’s auspicious big screen debut. Even today, the film remains cruelly undimmed, still ringing with an almost unrivaled intensity in its savagely bleak and totally uncompromising vision of a hi-tech modern prison that still buckles under the same pressures as the lo-tech, primal prisons that prefigured it.
The chilling mise-en-scene, coupled with gutsy performances from the likes of Bogdan Koca, Mike Bishop, Dave Mason, and Nick Cave himself, combine to form a brutal penal classic. “I was attacked and my jaw was broken in two places,” Hillcoat told Uncut of the film’s appropriately painful genesis. “My entire mouth was wired shut. I was talking to Nick Cave through clenched teeth, and having liquefied meals through straws. Literally, that’s how we started the script, talking about high security prison and violence, after having been a victim of violence myself.” Though Hillcoat would craft the film’s icy, alienated aesthetic, Nick Cave gave life to the reprobates who roamed the film’s prison. “He was already clued up on the whole music/prison thing, and the blues – all these characters came from literature and secondary sources,” Hillcoat explained. “Then myself and co-writer/producer, Evan English, did a lot more real research. We went into the prisons, and we took it somewhere more grounded in realism.”
Adding to that realism was local legend, David Field (Chopper, Two Hands, Silent Partner), who made his unforgettable debut in the film as young convict, Wenzil, who goes into the prison a meek outsider and leaves as something far more terrifying. “90% of the cast were the real deal,” David Field told FilmInk in 2000. “Apart from the guys playing the screws and Bogdan Koca, Dave Mason, and me, the rest of the guys had all done time. It was fantastic because you could just sit back and watch and absorb and see how these people were. I did a lot of research, and spent lots of time in a fake cell that I had set up, learning how to do nothing, and just learning how to do time, basically. We had to come to their way of acting rather than them learning to act. That’s a great thing. They’d say, ‘Come out and I’ll show you how to do a car if you want.’ You’d get little suggestions like that, or, ‘Why don’t you come and do a job with us?’ Um, I’ve got a job, thanks! It was a great experience. And a lot of those men were not like the perception of what so called criminals are allegedly like. There were many wonderful gentlemen among those people. More so than a lot of the pricks that I’ve met in the film and theatre game.”
Far from a smash hit, the influence of Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead has far outstripped its box office haul. “It’s one of those films that seems to have inspired and influenced a lot of people, and not just in Australia,” Hillcoat told FilmInk in 2003. “The British author, Tim Willocks, told me that his bestseller, Green River Rising, was largely inspired by the film. There are all sorts of weird connections that I keep accidentally stumbling across; the film was just so extreme and unusual, and it has this cult status. If it had a bigger release, it might have been more commercially satisfying for everyone involved, but unfortunately, that didn’t happen. It’s definitely on the fringe. I’ve always felt outside the industry, and all my films feel like that too.”
A prison film unlike any other, Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead announced Hillcoat as a major talent to watch…upon which he promptly disappeared from the feature filmmaking scene altogether. “Basically, I frittered away the nineties making pop videos and being pretty self- indulgent,” Hillcoat told The Scotsman in 2010. “I came over to England, but I didn’t pursue the feature films that I was offered. I was basically interested in documentary – Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead was originally going to be one. And for the next few years, I did a lot of research on Papua New Guinea, with a view to making a documentary there.” Eventually, this project slowly grew into Hillcoat’s second feature film, To Have And To Hold (1998), the brooding tale of a widower (Tcheky Karyo) living in Papua New Guinea who becomes obsessed with a young writer (Rachel Griffiths), and then tries to reinvent her in the image of his dead wife. A brave and darkly poetic rumination on the nature of love and grieving, and the stark differences between the developing and the overdeveloped worlds, To Have And To Hold failed to make any impact at the box office. “It didn’t so much go straight to video as straight to oblivion,” Hillcoat would later smile.
Hardly the most prolific of filmmakers, Hillcoat’s next feature film wouldn’t come until 2005, but it wasn’t for lack of trying, and it once again found the director holding forth on the issues of crime and punishment. From 1976’s Mad Dog Morgan through to 2003’s Ned Kelly, the iconic figure of the bushranger has provided thick, meaty grist for Australian filmmakers. The best movie on the subject, however, remains Hillcoat’s arid, bloodstained masterpiece, The Proposition. Driven by hallucinatory cinematography from Benoit Delhomme and a tersely poetic script by Nick Cave (who also teams with Warren Ellis for the stirring, unconventional soundtrack), the film pits brother against brother in the brutal, unforgiving outback, as hard bitten outlaw, Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce), attempts to haul in his demonic elder sibling, Arthur (Danny Huston), in order to save his younger brother, the simple-minded Mike (Richard Wilson), who is shaking – alone and desperate – in the gaol of the highly compromised Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone). “I’m a big fan of the westerns of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, and I could see that Australia had its own history for that,” Hillcoat told FilmInk of his inspirations for the film. “The landscape is certainly perfect for the setting.”
Unlike the gap that yawned between Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead and To Have And To Hold, however, Hillcoat’s next absence from cinema screens wasn’t due to any lack of diligence on the director’s part. He’d longed to make a film about bushrangers since his days in film school, and this time, it was outside forces that worked against his project. “It was an absolute nightmare to get off the ground,” Hillcoat sighed to FilmInk in 2005. “We were looking for partners in Australia, and the majority of producers didn’t want to touch it. People thought that it was too dark and violent. It was very difficult getting the cast, and logistically, it was very, very difficult. It was quite an expensive film, because everything was in the middle of the desert, and when you’re doing period – and I really love detail and making whatever world you present very believable – it’s instantly more expensive. I was at pains trying to get the right detail in there, and to do that was a lot more expensive than what Nick and I had initially imagined. But the primary difficulty – and this is one that I’ve had my entire career – is the ‘too dark’ thing. It’s a shame.”
Though hardly a box office giant, The Proposition was seen by all the right people, and it sealed Hillcoat’s name internationally. His predilection for darkness, meanwhile, didn’t hurt when it came to his next project. Shot in the blazing heat of inland Queensland, The Proposition was a long, tough slog for the director, but his big screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Road, was even more difficult to piece together. There were delayed start dates, interrupted shooting schedules, a drawn out post-production process, and delayed release dates. It was a coup, however, for Hillcoat to have won the gig at all. There were bigger directors after the project, there was studio interest, and lots of people were circling. But producer, Nick Wechsler (Reservation Road, North Country), got a hold of The Road before it was published. The noted Cormac McCarthy fan missed out on optioning No Country For Old Men, and he went after the book rights with a vengeance, considering Hillcoat early on to direct on the back of The Proposition. “If I’m being totally honest, when I first heard that the material was about a post-apocalyptic world, I thought, ‘Oh, shit!,’” Hillcoat laughed to FilmInk in 2009. “It’s not my favourite genre, even though I love Cormac McCarthy. But its effect on me was incredible. I couldn’t say no.”
The Road begins ten years after the world has been destroyed by an unnamed cataclysmic event. There is no energy, no power, no vegetation, no food, and very few people. The Man (Viggo Mortensen) and The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) – “each the other’s world entire,” as McCarthy describes them in his novel – are on the move. As they make the slow, arduous trek towards the coast, hoping for a warmer climate and more plentiful food supplies, their survival is perilous. There are scavengers everywhere, along with gangs of cannibals cruising the empty roads looking for their next meal. It’s a bleak, grey world, where survival becomes an act of defiance, yet it’s impossible to look away. “This is actually an optimistic film, and it’s all about hope,” Hillcoat told FilmInk of the surprisingly engaging nature of the film. “Even though all these terrible things happen to this man and his son, you see snatches of goodness, and you want them to survive. You’re on the edge of your seat the whole time. I’m drawn to extreme scenarios, so that makes me doubly a Cormac McCarthy fan. The Proposition was very much influenced by McCarthy’s novel, Blood Meridian, and this one totally floored me because of the profound emotional impact that it made. I thought, ‘I have to make it’, and yet I was also very scared.”
There were scarier things, however, to come. While completing post-production on The Road, Hillcoat was getting ready to start work on a true dream project. Adapted by Nick Cave from Matt Bondurant’s novel, The Wettest County In The World, the retitled Promised Land was set to star hot young talents, Shia LaBeouf, Ryan Gosling, James Franco, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams, Paul Dano, and Michael Shannon, and tracked a gang of violent moonshiners running liquor through Franklin County, Virginia, during The Prohibition Era. The film looked like a potential winner, but with The Global Financial Crisis rearing its ugly head, and modes of film financing suddenly shifting, Promised Land joined a host of other shelved “mid-level” budgeted projects, as funding sadly dried up. “It’s the worst time,” Hillcoat sighed to FilmInk of the movie’s collapse. “Sorry to be melodramatic, but it really is. To make a film now…it’s the lowest point since cinema began. The studios are in such a self-defeating spiral.”
In the end, all of the initial cast members but Shia LaBeouf drifted away, with the actor too snarled up in Hillcoat’s initial promise that they would make “Goodfellas in the woods.” But Hillcoat and his producers, Lucy Fisher and Doug Wick (who had optioned the book back in 2008, and immediately sent it to their director), were dead in the water. In an echo of what had happened to Hillcoat before, the film’s backing studio, Sony, decided that the script was too dark considering the current world climate, and then every other studio backed away. But nobody gave up, least of all John Hillcoat, who began scouting out a new cast while his producers began scraping together the $22 million needed to bankroll the film. Remarkably, the retitled Lawless eventually got made, in spite of the safety-first studio climate. Not only that, but the violent, venal work was mounted without a shred of compromise, with Fisher and Wick eventually securing funding through independent means. The new cast (with LaBeouf joined by Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, Gary Oldman, Mia Wasikowska, and Jason Clarke), meanwhile, was just as impressive as the first.
And curiously, the Prohibition-era Lawless actually careens directly into Triple 9, thematically. According to Hillcoat, Lawless is bang up to date, with its themes just as relevant now as they ever were. “The drug war is an epic failure. It’s still going on,” the director told FilmInk in 2012, pointing out that Prohibition mirrors the current situation in Mexico with drug cartels. “There’s economic collapse again. There’s the same divide between the rich and poor. There’s environmental collapse. There are so many similarities.” Triple 9 comes at these themes head on, and grabs them willfully by the scruff of the neck. Intriguingly, these themes are a million miles away from the English coastal town of Brighton, where Hillcoat now lives, just a few streets away from his good friend, Nick Cave. It’s also the setting for an as-yet unmade script that Cave has penned called Death Of A Ladies’ Man. “John doesn’t want to do it for some reason,” Cave joked to FilmInk in 2012. “He just wants to make big Hollywood movies, and this is a little English film.”
John Hillcoat’s Hollywood movies, however, are nothing like those made by most other filmmakers. Unlike his peers, when this uncompromising Australian director’s projects are deemed “too dark”, the description is usually wholly justified. From prisoners and bushrangers to moonshiners, cannibals, corrupt cops, and hatefully hardened crooks, Hillcoat’s cinematic world exists solely on society’s fringes. The director, however, has no truck in exploitation, and he refuses to luxuriate in the violence that drives his films. “We’re trying to make every death mean something,” Hillcoat says of Triple 9. “I’ve always been anti-violence. In this film, there will always be consequences. It’s real, and it’s messy. It’s physically painful and it’s psychologically devastating. It’s not an escapist film.” Triple 9 should fit perfectly on John Hillcoat’s bullet-pocked resume…
With additional reporting by James Mottram.
Triple 9 is released in cinemas on March 19.
