CIFF: Filmmaker wanted to "bend the genre" with Alberta-shot dark western The Thicket (2024)

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There was a lot of talk about fathers on the Alberta set of The Thicket.

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In fact, the film is dedicated to British director Elliott Lester’s father, who died a week after making his son promise he would take the reins of the dark western. Lester’s father tended to look over the scripts his son was considering and strongly encouraged him to do the film, which he had been attached to for a few years. The Thicket stars Peter Dinklage, Levon Hawke, Esme Creed-Miles, Metallica’s James Hetfield, Leslie Grace and Juliette Lewis.

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Lewis plays a ruthless gang leader named Cut Throat Bill and is the daughter of character actor Geoffrey Lewis, who died in 2015 and was a veteran of more than 200 films, including a number of westerns.

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“He had done a movie called High Plains Drifter where he played a villain,” says Lester, in an interview with Postmedia. “For her, Cut Throat Bill was a callback for him. She speaks about her father quite a lot.”

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While The Thicket does not seem like a family movie, per se, the vibe was appropriate.

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The film, which will screen Thursday, Sept. 19 at the Jack Singer Concert Hall as part of the opening gala for the Calgary International Film Festival, has some definite hallmarks of the classic western, but it is essentially a story about family, or more specifically the lack of family.

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Hawke, who is the son of actors Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, plays Jack Parker. After the death of his parents in turn-of-the-century Texas, Jack is quickly thrust into another drama when the murderous Cut Throat Bill and a gang of ruthless outlaws kidnap his sister, Lula (Creed-Miles). He enlists the help of Reginald Jones (Dinklage), a bounty hunter who eventually leads a band of outcasts that includes a former slave named Eustace Howard (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and a prostitute named Jimmie Sue (Leslie Grace) in pursuit of Bill, who plans on taking Lula to a beautiful but chilling no-man’s land called The Thicket. Throughout the action, we learn snippets of the characters’ backstory and what they all have in common.

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“With all of the characters, I was trying to expose this idea of humanity,” says Lester. “There was the notion that everybody was an orphan and everybody was looking for a home and what does it look like. Reginald Jones doesn’t have a home, doesn’t have a family. Eustace doesn’t have a home, doesn’t have a family. Jack is losing his family. Bill never had a home. She has this dysfunctional gang that acts as her family.”

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The Thicket was initially set to be shot in Spain. Dinklage, who is also a producer of the film and is probably best known for his Emmy-winning turn as Tyrion Lannister in HBO’s Game of Thrones, has been attached to the project since 2014, having optioned the 2013 novel by Joe R. Lansdale. The initial production was derailed by COVID. Lester was friends with the late David Von Ancken, who had worked as a director and producer on the Alberta-shot AMC western series Hell on Wheels from 2011 to 2016. Before he died in 2021, he introduced Lester to Chad Oakes and Mike Frislev, the Calgary-based producers from Nomadic Pictures, who were behind Hell on Wheels. They were also producers of 2006’s Broken Trail, another Alberta-shot western directed by Hollywood icon, and Lester’s friend, Walter Hill. Hill approved of both the screenplay and the location.