![]() ![]() Soon after Buster’s hokey song, “Cool Water,” the body count accumulates and the Roy Rogers-sheen rapidly retreats for far crueler twists and tales of frontier justice across a wanton Wild West, from a tireless prospector played by Tom Waits to a westward traveling wagon train with a dog problem. It’s the opening salvo in a six-part anthology film from the Coens that corrals a stampede of Western archetypes and tropes only to invert, distort and deliriously amplify them. Its majestic sandstone buttes, a revolving backdrop for John Ford, have been the setting for countless stagecoach chases and John Wayne passages.Īnd thanks to the Coen brothers’ “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” this hallowed Colorado ground is also now home to Tim Blake Nelson, as the all-white-clad “San Saba songbird” Buster Scruggs, strumming his guitar on a horse and singing, with twang and gusto, like a slightly deranged Roy Rogers. And it's true for them it was really a big visual effects film - they were joking it was their Marvel film basically.New York – No location is more central to the iconography of the Western than Monument Valley. He was like my god, we never had that before. I was around for the whole shoot, and at some point very late in the schedule I jokingly said to Joel, hey, today is actually the first day for me where I don't have anything to do in terms of visual effects. ![]() It didn't really matter what was happening outside - that's not what the film was about. And for the moving background in the carriage they were referencing Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist, in which there's a train sequence which is clearly rear projection but it doesn't bother you. It didn't really reference Westerns so much as other classic films like Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, which has this really artificial set design. This was a challenge because had a hard time describing what they were after. Lemke: The Mortal Remains is practically all shot on bluescreen, made to look very artificial, like a stage play almost. CG is something that scales - the more shots you are working on with CG the better.įor this gothic final tale, CG horses pull a stagecoach into the unknown. Building a CG pipeline from scratch is an enormous amount of work, and in our case it was literally only four shots of CG horses. One of the sequences was the Battle of the Bastards from Game of Thrones, and we thought how about we just reach out to the company who did that? That was Iloura in Australia. Joel and Ethan knew how hard it is to make believable CG animals, so early on they compiled a reel of digital horse stunts they found in other recent films. We went out and tried to find other reference material for horse falls - the stuff I mostly found was racehorses breaking their legs, really horrible stuff. That had to be a very specific violent animation so it was believable. I think there's two horse falls that were done by animal trainers, but what the Coens wanted is the horses step into the prairie dog holes littered around the landscape then break their legs, and you couldn't do that for real. But there was still a couple of duplications needed, some matte painting work and some really complicated CG horse work to augment the real life stunt work. ![]() Lemke: Surprisingly most of the wagon stuff is shot for real - they actually had 15 ![]() In this heartwrenching segment, wagon train settler Zoe Kazan faces marauding attackers on horseback. ![]()
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