Ti West Trades Ghosts for Gunslingers In a Valley of Violence
Ti West talks In a Valley of Violence and upending Western tropes.
Photos: Focus Features
Director Ti West has built an oeuvre of intimate dread around meticulous pacing and tight scripting. Look no further than previous features House of the Devil (2009), The Innkeepers (2011) and The Sacrament (2013) to see a cinephile channeling the VHS esoterica of countless sleepovers into indie gold. (Appropriately, West cites Peter Jackson’s DIY ode to schlock, Bad Taste, as a watershed inspiration.)
Like fellow lo-fi filmmakers Joe Swanberg, Adam Wingard, Simon Barrett and Jason Eisener, West recently found himself with a larger budget and a bigger cast. In a Valley of Violence, currently in theaters and on-demand, still retains West’s obsessive eye for mounting tension and anti-blockbuster twists, but it’s also his most accessible, brash effort to date. The brutal Neo-Western stars Ethan Hawke as Paul, a drifter with a scene-stealing pooch (Jumpy) who wanders through the titular valley. A series of conflicts erupt around a corrupt lawman (James Ransone) and his more level-headed U.S. Marshal father (John Travolta) before colliding into a visceral climax. Meanwhile, Taissa Farmiga further upends formula by playing a teenage pistol, Mary-Anne, attempting to leave her austere home.
The film is a considered, honed contribution to the Western tradition, and a precedent for West’s ascension from watercooler horror to larger indie stages. West exchanged some emails with Paste, detailing his reasons for swapping genres, feminism in Westerns and his writing process.
Paste Magazine: I could see your short in The ABCs of Death as well as your last feature, The Sacrament, shifting toward realism, but I never expected a Western. What attracts you to the genre? How did you want to innovate within it, if at all?
Ti West: After The Sacrament, my exploration of realism in horror had come to an end. It was something I was really interested in trying, and once it was done I didn’t want to repeat myself. I wanted to move to something traditionally cinematic and larger than life.
For me, the Western was the ideal genre. As a filmmaker, it is a bit of a dream to get to do a Western, and I wanted to see if I could pull it off. I was interested in setting up familiar archetypes and then when they are confronted with violence, they stop acting like archetypes and start acting like normal people. That was the thematic genesis of the project.
Paste: In a Valley of Violence captures large, sweeping vistas as opposed to the more claustrophobic sets of your former movies (The Sacrament excluded). Was there a learning curve to capturing the openness of the West?
West: Each movie is different, and therefore so is the approach. Any film you make pretty much has to be part of your DNA before you roll cameras, so whether it’s confined to an interior location or on top of a cliff overlooking an incredible Southwestern vista, it’s the same process from behind the lens. That having been said, it was nice to get outside on this one.
