Why did you want to tell that story in particular?
I wanted to make a movie about an outlaw. I love the myth of the American outlaw, and I wanted to play around with it and take it apart a little bit. There's so much of America wrapped up in that ideology. You look at something like Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which is one of my favorite movies, and there's a very sardonic look at modern corporate business practices layered inside this beautifully antiquated Western. That just comes naturally to the genre, I think. But in any case, that's how it all started: an outlaw on the run, and out of that idea everything else just naturally grew. I'd always look for the simplest answers to the questions that would present themselves. Why does he break out of jail? Maybe he has a wife he has to find. One thing lead to another.
The film is obviously "classical" (in the best sense of the term), reminiscent of 70s films or even Homer's Odyssey, but at the same time, it feels very lively…
I certainly wanted to imbue the film with a sort of classicism, both in terms of the story and the way it is presented. We wanted it to feel old, in the grandest sense of the word, and our attempts to achieve that ranged from the words in the script to the sort of bulbs we used to light the sets. I always believe that if you tell a familiar story, it gives you a chance to pay attention to other things because audiences already know what to expect - provided you give them those things to pay attention to, of course! That's how you make old things feel new.
How would you define your film? Is it a melodrama, is it a crime film?
I like to describe the movie as a folk song. If I were to categorize it more traditionally, I would say that it is a romance. This is something I didn't quite realize until we were editing the film. There are elements of the crime genre and certainly some melodrama to it, but the romance of it all is what resounds the loudest.
