Graham Broadbent has produced five films with Martin McDonagh, so when he puts the problem of Wild Horse Nine in one sentence I take him at his word: there are no food facilities on Rapa Nui, or really anything else for making a film. Everyone will write about the dialogue and about John Malkovich, who came home from Venice with the Volpi Cup. I want to write about the department nobody reviews. In France we call it la régie, and it has no clean English name: one chef, the régisseur général, carrying locations, permits, lodging, catering and transport in a single folder. On this film it was the film.
Broadbent calls Rapa Nui the most remote inhabited place on earth and puts it at two and a half thousand miles off the Chilean coast; the islanders say more than 3,500 kilometres, a shade over two thousand miles, and I will not referee between a producer and an islander on distance. Either way, the nearest rental house is on another continent.
The year before the boat
McDonagh had been carrying the island for fifteen years. He went there looking for a place that might do for a film what Bruges had done for his first, found the moai and wild horses loose across the whole island, and spent a decade and a half trying two-man stories against it: an older man and a younger one, father and son in one draft, two actors in another. Nothing held until about four years ago, when he put the island together with what the CIA did in Chile in 1973, Rapa Nui being a dependency of Chile. That is the writer’s calendar. The producer’s begins about a year before the first day of shooting, which is when Blueprint opened the conversation with the island’s authorities.
The island did not want them. One feature had been shot there before, Kevin Reynolds’s Rapa Nui, about thirty years ago. So the talking began with the council and continued with the Ma’u Henua Indigenous Community, which administers the national park. Before the first feuille de service went out, the production sat down with Ma’u Henua and agreed the conditions: timetables, camera positions, the ground that could be crossed and the ground that could not. Archaeologists watched every day of work, and the community kept its own people on the set. The moai are sacred, the park is protected, and the rule that came out of those meetings was plain: take everything in, and take everything out afterwards.
Twelve months of meetings before the first container was loaded. A year of talking costs calendar more than money; the money leaves months before day one, on freight and deposits, whether or not the meetings went well.
Everything in, everything out
Everything came by ship: cameras, period cars carried over from the mainland to make 1973 in the streets of Hanga Roa. The Chilean partner was Fabula, Juan de Dios Larraín’s company, and anyone who has shot abroad knows the local producer is the person who knows which boat actually sails. The crew came from Santiago and Britain; the island supplied the rest. About eighty islanders worked on a unit of some two hundred, by the count of Leonardo Pakarati, the Rapa Nui filmmaker who worked the local side of the production: construction, drivers, transport, catering, and the extras for a day’s shooting at Anakena beach, who came from the island’s tour guides and their families.
The cast were called to the island at the end of February 2025 and shooting was under way in March. The unit stayed until April, then moved to the mainland, a rayuela club in Conchalí, the airport at Santiago, the city centre, and wrapped on 28 April. Broadbent says three months on the island and McDonagh says two and a half, and the calendar only closes if the producer is counting the freight in and the strike out, which is what a producer counts. Before any of it, in January, Malkovich and McDonagh rehearsed in New York at the Public Theater, and that is the right order for a location at the end of a shipping lane: rehearse where the actors are, then travel with the scenes already in the body.
I shot once on an island where the boat came twice a day and the second one was a rumour. The régisseur kept a list of what was on the far side of the water, and after the feuille de service it was the most-read document on the set.
What you cannot ship
You can ship a camera package and a period car. You cannot ship the weather, and there is nothing on Rapa Nui to hide a unit behind when it turns. McDonagh describes the key scene between Malkovich and Rockwell among the moai, where the sun went behind cloud at exactly the right moment; he calls it simply a perfect moment and insists it was not digital. I believe him. I also know the face a chef op wears in the ten minutes before such a moment, when the plan de travail says this scene, this hour, this light, and the light has other ideas. The horses, his first revelation on the island, he wanted everywhere in the frame, and loose horses on a protected site in a period picture is a line a first assistant reads twice.
What McDonagh says he has learned as a director rather than as a writer is to leave room for the quiet, dialogue-free moments, and he is precise about where they die:
“Sometimes the thing that can be cut from a script or from a shooting schedule is a man looking out a window, or alone in his room, or on his bed smoking a cigarette, but it’s in those moments that everything happens.”
Every first assistant knows which strips go when the day collapses: the ones with no lines on them. On this film those strips are where the regret lives, and a production that protected them on a schedule with a boat at both ends did its real work in prep, not on the day. His note to Malkovich, in one of the scenes among the moai, after a couple of takes, was “More David Attenborough.” Malkovich calls it one of the best he has had in a hundred and fifty films (he is not counting, he says, and he counted). It is also a note that takes no time, which on a location like this is the only kind the schedule has room for.
What the island kept
The island’s own view of the shoot was divided. Some welcomed the work and the visibility; others worried about what two hundred people and a camera do to a territory that guards itself. I side with the worriers, and so, to its credit, did the production; that is what the year of meetings was for. Hiring eighty of its people and leaving nothing behind did not end the argument, and nobody on the film should have expected it to. Searchlight is taking the picture back for a community screening on the island in the second week of November, a few days after the release.
This was not a $3M film, and I will not pretend its boat is yours. The sequence is. For anyone prepping a feature whose location is the film, two things. Give the year to the producer and the local co-producer, as Broadbent and Fabula did, and let the régie inherit the relationship when it crews up in hard prep, because camera positions are negotiated with people who know your name, and on this island the people who knew theirs had known them for a year. And budget the boat out before the boat in. Broadbent’s rule, everything in and everything out, is two lines on the top sheet, and the second is the one that gets raided when the shoot runs over.
To the location managers and the régie: when the location had no rental house within a day’s travel, what did you ship that you never unpacked, and what did you forget that no boat could bring in time?
Part of the production detail here I owe to The Hollywood Reporter’s Telluride conversation with Graham Broadbent and the cast, to Rolling Stone, and to Rapa Nui Travel Guide and Easter Island Travel, who watched the shoot from the island.