| Such a method served director Simon Wincer especially well on the set of his latest film, Monte Walsh, a Western for TNT premiering January 17, 2003. Called in to replace the picture's original director five days into shooting, Wincer read the script on the plane from his native Australia to the Calgary set and, as a result, "those first impressions" were pretty much his only impressions. "I arrived on a Saturday night and started shooting Monday morning," Wincer recalled. "I hit the ground running and shot the whole thing in 32 days."
Set in 1892 Wyoming and based on a Jack Schaeffer novel (previously filmed in 1970), Monte Walsh is the heartfelt story of a cowboy (Tom Selleck) determined to stay put during a vastly changing time. Modern civilization is encroaching on his fading lifestyle, and one-by-one his friends bow out of the cowboy life — be it through retiring, adapting to new jobs, turning to crime, or dying. The film features a large cast, many horses and cattle, and several complicated sequences involving fights, roping, and stuntwork — seemingly not the easiest project for a director to join moments before production.
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But, Wincer said, "coming into something so late has its advantages. You don't think about it too much before you do it. Your initial emotional response to a scene is sometimes by far the best one." In fact, there were several scenes that Wincer had no time to plan at all, and he cited one as being among his favorite moments in the film. "There's a shot of Tom [Selleck] riding along the railway tracks with a steam engine behind him. To me, it symbolizes what the whole show's about. I'd been busy shooting a big fight scene the day before and I had no idea until I got to location how I was going to shoot this. If I'd been on the film two months in advance, I might have come up with something really preconceived and not nearly as nice."
Of course, having 30 years of directing under his belt helped make such quick thinking possible. Wincer started his career in the mailroom of an Australian TV station at the age of 18, and at 21 he was directing football matches and non-narrative programming. After three years in England, where he received stage training and worked as a television AD (including one stint for Ridley Scott), Wincer returned home to direct cop shows, which he found to be a fine training ground. "Six-day shoots for a one-hour drama, and rain, hail, or shine, you had to finish. You had two days to do the interior dialogue scenes and four days to do the location. Every show had a car chase or a foot chase and a fight. You just learned what you could and couldn't do. Doing that 48 weeks of the year for four years was fantastic training."
In 1979, Wincer made his feature debut with the low-budget, Australian Snapshot. Four years later, the success of his film Phar Lap, the story of a legendary Australian racehorse, secured him a Hollywood agent and an outpouring of offers. (It didn't hurt that Wincer had also just executive produced The Man From Snowy River, also a huge hit.) He moved to Los Angeles and plunged right in, directing the Paramount feature D.A.R.Y.L. and the Disney telefilm The Girl Who Spelled Freedom.
Wincer has never stopped shifting between the feature and television worlds. Over the last decade or so, while making features like Quigley Down Under, Free Willy, Operation Dumbo Drop, The Phantom, and Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, he has also directed such TV fare as the miniseries Lonesome Dove and P.T. Barnum, several Young Indiana Jones programs for George Lucas, and the TNT Western Crossfire Trail, the highest-rated movie in basic cable history.
I like going between the two mediums," Wincer said. "The thing I love about television is that it's down and dirty. Once the 'go' button is pressed, you're off and running. It's totally concentrated. With features, you're quite often waiting — for the cast, for someone to read a script, for something!"
When asked how he chooses his projects, Wincer chuckled, "People say I'm the 'large mammal' director because I've done Free Willy and Operation Dumbo Drop. But I knew when I read Free Willy that if I could deliver the moment where the whale jumped over the wall, we had a massive movie. When I read material, I think about how an audience will respond emotionally — if I can make the hairs on the backs of their necks stand up. That's what I look for."
That said, Wincer does possess a special affection for the Western genre. "I've been around horses since I was a little boy," he said enthusiastically, "and I own a cattle farm here in Australia. I ride every spare moment. It's an incredibly difficult genre, and you have to have great patience. You have to know what actors are capable of, particularly ones that aren't good riders, and what you can and can't do with horses. The general logistics of a Western are so overwhelming. There's always a crisis — the weather changes radically, or somebody gets hurt — but you have to keep plowing on. The most important thing is being able to roll with the punches and adapt when it doesn't turn out the way you want. You can't keep doing it again and again because, for example, horses and cattle don't always go where you want them to go."
The challenge of coming onto Monte Walsh so late in the game was definitely helped by having a cast of veterans. Working alongside Wincer's old friend, Selleck, were Isabella Rossellini, Wallace Shawn, James Gammon, Keith Carradine, and many other seasoned professionals. "I look to my cast to know their characters inside and out much better than I," Wincer said. "Isabella arrived so prepared and with all the right questions and certainly made my life pretty easy."
The cast seemed to get caught up in the spirit of the film Wincer feels. "Every actor was literally on the set the whole time, saying 'Can I help out? Can I do something in the background?' That helped their camaraderie really come through."
Indeed, that camaraderie is one of the strongest aspects of Monte Walsh. Many scenes are comprised of the group of cowboys working together on the range or talking among themselves in the bunkhouse — always a challenging type of scene for any director to make interesting. One key to staging these scenes, Wincer said, is to establish the space and keep it established clearly for the audience. "You start where everybody lives and work from there. Monte's sitting on his bed, those guys are doing leather over there, these guys are playing cards at the table, and so on. And then compositionally you shoot past guys in the foreground to the guys in the background. Geography's incredibly important because otherwise the audience won't understand who you're cutting to and why. Cuts have to be motivated, and they're motivated by where you put people and by making the audience want to see them at a particular point."
Furthermore, he added, "Westerns are about body language." Wincer used a generous amount of wide shots to enable the actors' body language to come through effectively.
Another key to such group scenes was to direct the cast to play against the story's strong theme of eroding cowboy life. "I had them play the life, not 'the life is fast disappearing,' " Wincer said. "Let the audience get that. Cowboys don't go around with long faces, feeling sorry for themselves. They take it on the chin and just get on with life."
Wincer's "miles of television over the years" has allowed him to hone an efficient, fast-moving style of directing. He rarely storyboards and "always" uses multiple cameras "as long as it works with the light. It's incredibly useful for continuity, particularly horses, because they never stand where you want them to for long."
Wincer typically will start his shooting day blocking the scene with just the actors (pre-wardrobe and makeup), AD, and script supervisor. "I'm very strict about that. It's 20 times faster. There's no one talking quietly off on the side. It's me and the actors. It's our time. Then I'll have the DP wander in before everyone else so that by the time the crew sees it, it's running smoothly. Then I send everybody off to get ready."
The pitfall of blocking in front of a crew, Wincer feels, is that "actors tend to start performing to them, particularly if it's a lighthearted scene. The worst thing is people starting to play laughs." Once shooting begins, "I always start with a master shot because once you've done that, everyone knows where all the bits go. And it means it's very fast work. It makes a lot of sense."
Years of experience have also taught Wincer useful little tricks of the trade. For the huge fistfight in Monte Walsh, for example, Wincer said, "I shot a lot of it on long lenses because you get great movement within the frame and they always look a bit more edgy intercut with wide-angle shots." For the scenes of gunplay, the director heightened the sounds of the shootings as much as possible, "to show the power of guns. I don't do it on every movie, but it was particularly important on this one because there are only four times that guns are fired."
| "Westerns are an incredibly difficult genre, and you have to have great patience. You have to know what actors are capable of..." |
Like many directors, Wincer enjoys the shorthand that develops from bringing along his key collaborators from film to film. As it turned out, much of the crew of Monte Walsh had previously worked with him on Crossfire Trail, starting with DP David Eggby, an old friend from Australian TV days. "He hates horses but he's great at shooting them!" Wincer laughed. "He's a great leader too, which is very important on a film like this where you're working incredibly long hours."
Wincer was full of praise for his two DGA 2nd unit directors, Rod Hardy and Walter Scott. Scott shot much of one of the film's most memorable sequences, in which Selleck rides a bucking horse out of a corral, down the street, into a store, and through a window before coming to a standstill. The two-minute finished sequence took three days' work by the 2nd unit and one and a half days' work by the main unit.
Wincer heightened the scene's drama by introducing the horse to the audience (and Selleck's character) earlier in the film. By the time of this sequence, "that stallion has become a character, largely through use of sound effects and so forth, which are incredibly important in Westerns. They create the atmosphere — the smell, if you like."
Before directing Monte Walsh, Wincer found himself in Namibia, Africa, shooting his first film in the IMAX format: the 47-minute, narrative Disney film The Young Black Stallion, due out next September. "IMAX was a huge new learning curve," Wincer said. "To do a close-up is almost impossible. Even a medium shot is 30-feet tall. And then I went from an IMAX screen to doing Monte Walsh for television! Talk about one extreme to the other."
Wincer offered some sound advice for young directors. "The quicker you can start directing, that's what it's all about. It doesn't matter what it is. Don't be snobbish about it; just churn it out. The more you do it, the more it becomes like driving a car. And once you can think on your feet — boy, it's just so much easier because you can get so much more out of scenes."
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