Martin McDonagh traveled to Rapa Nui fifteen years ago in search of a story, but it took him some time to land the idea that is now crystallizing into Wild Horse Nine (in theaters on November 13), a political comedy—or, more precisely, a political dramedy—that debuted at the Venice Film Festival, then appeared at San Sebastián, and will surely reach the Oscars (and other awards). One of its leads, John Malkovich, has already won the Volpi Cup at the Biennale and should sweep the season.
“And I will search for you in Greenland, in Peru, in Tibet, in Japan, on Easter Island. And I will search for you in the jungles of Borneo, in the craters of Mars, in the rings of Saturn…”. The Zombies had already included Easter Island, known to the natives as Rapa Nui, in the catalog of places in their iconic song Greenland as an example of that remote corner of the world… And it is precisely because it is a lost, idealized, paradisiacal, almost mystical little corner that Martin McDonagh chose to go there fifteen years ago. “I went hoping to find there a story to tell in a movie,” the director of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, In Bruges or The Banshees of Inisherin told us at the San Sebastián Film Festival last year. “And I tried; I wrote several versions, but it wasn’t until I remembered a The Clash song, Washington Bullets, which I discovered as a teenager and in which I first learned of the CIA’s involvement in the overthrow of Allende and which also referenced Víctor Jara and his murder. When I connected those ideas—CIA, Chile, and Rapa Nui—the story blossomed.”
