The US’s history of intervening in democratic processes around the world deserves more attention in the light of current political developments, playwright and film-maker Martin McDonagh has said, as his Oscar-tipped film about a rueful CIA agent premieres at the Venice film festival.
“I’ve been very interested in the truth of what the CIA has been doing over the last 60 years, and the awful things they’ve done all around the world,” McDonagh said about Wild Horse Nine, his first film since his 2022 tragicomedy The Banshees of Inisherin. “I think maybe something that’s not talked about enough. We know what the KGB are like, but we probably don’t question the CIA’s activity as much as we ought to.”
In Wild Horse Nine, John Malkovich plays Chris, a veteran agent for the foreign intelligence service who is stationed in Santiago, Chile, on the eve of the US-supported coup against Salvador Allende – Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist president – in 1973. Recently diagnosed with cancer and acting erratically, Chris is dispatched to Easter Island with his protege Lee (Sam Rockwell), where he starts to reflect critically on his role in other CIA interventions, including the Guatemalan coup d’état of 1954, the 1961 assassination of revolutionary Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba and – according to the film’s telling – the killing of John F Kennedy.
McDonagh said he had originally set out writing a screenplay about a father and son who were both actors, but the story had only started to gel when he tied the story to the CIA overthrow of Allende. “I realised that the story could be about a guy who [feels] guilt and regret about the things he has done,” he said. “It took it away from something a bit corny to somewhere much sadder and darker.”
As well as Rockwell and Malkovich, who has already been tipped as an Oscar contender for his leading turn, Wild Horse Nine stars Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey and Tom Waits.
Asked at the press conference what they thought of the Trump administration’s illegal capturing of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in January, the US members of the cast looked reluctant to answer. “I can’t think any more,” said Malkovich.
London-born Irish national McDonagh took over the mic instead. “I think, for me, one of the frightening things is that they don’t seem to be making it covert any more, which is very strange,” he said. “Like in the 70s, at least these horrible people had the intelligence to keep their acts secret, but it just feels like things are getting stupider and stupider and stupider.”
“When I wrote the film and we made it, it was to talk about 1973 and Chile at that point,” McDonagh added. “But watching it now, it does feel like it does seem to have a bit of a commentary on present day geopolitics.”