Interview : Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan talks Sicario

It’s Awards Season. Taylor Sheridan is focused on promoting his latest film Sicario. You know the name from his acting career, starring on Sons Of Anarchy and CSI. Sicario is his first screenplay, I sat down with Sheridan to talk about the film and why he made the jump from acting to screenwriting.

Awards Daily: I’ve known you since your acting days. What made you take the step into screenwriting?

Taylor Sheridan: You know, I’ve spent a lot of time as an actor. I made a journeyman actor. I just became fascinated with telling my story. I didn’t want to tell other people’s stories anymore. I wanted to tell my own. I really fell in love with that notion. As an extremist, I wanted to do something, so that’s what I did.
I quit acting and I started writing. The business had shown me – as an actor – what life would be like for me, and life was fine. I had reached as high as I was going to reach as an actor. As an artist, I just wasn’t getting what I wanted to do, I decided to tell my stories.

AD: How was Sicario born?

TS: It was a combination of a few things. It was a fascination with a largely ignored calamity happening so close to our own border. It affects so many people and is a massive business that really permeates every region of this nation and wreaks such havoc and isn’t talked about.

At the time I wrote the screenplay, it was at the height of the three-way war going in with Mexico with various cartels and the army’s intervention. The carnage, violence and the casualties of that was so massive, and shocking. It was also widely unreported. It took effort to find some coverage of it in American news. It seemed when a reporter would cover it, there was no appetite to look at it. Which I think because there was no answer to it, other than eliminate the demand. How does one do that? To me, it was a fascinating landscape to explore a lot of themes, from does the end justify the means to what is the price of our appetite? What is the toll of trying to live by a rule of law when no one else is? What justifies military involvement? What are the consequences of that involvement? To me, they were really rich questions that were relevant and worthy of exploring?

AD: How did it get from you to Denis Villeneuve (The Director)?

TS: Basil Iwanyk the producer read the screenplay and really liked it and decided he wanted to be involved in it. We had tacos and beer and talked about who would be a great director. Ed McConnell was working on this film with Denis in London. Basil asked if I was familiar with Ed, and if I’d seen Prisoners. I made it halfway through that film, and it was just so disturbing that I called Basil telling him I couldn’t watch it. He’s perfect. At the same time, coincidentally, Denis found the title intriguing. Ed and he were sitting down to dinner, Denis was reading the script and according to Ed his face went ghost white, and he agreed to make it.

I met him. He’s so intelligent and caring that I trusted him. I had been very protective of Sicario and I knew in his hands it was and it would be what it was intended to be.

AD: Did he change it much from the screenplay you wrote?

TS: No, not really. There are certain things that were omitted as a result. There’s a scene we added, that Benicio suggested. There’s also the evolution of the screenplay based on the realities of where can you shoot: we can’t shoot here… we have to move it to that location… what consequences does that have on the screenplay? Can we fix this? That happens on any film, but the movie on the screen is a very true representation of the screenplay.

AD: One thing I love about the film is how powerful Emily Blunt’s character and performance is. You wrote the part as a female role, but you were met with some struggles from the studio, do you want to talk about that?

TS: I think that story has gotten warped in its retelling.

AD: Let’s set it straight.

TS: Yes. Let me set it straight. What happened was this. Very early on, a year before Basil and I came together. I took a meeting with a producer and it was literally the first meeting I took on Sicario. The guy made me wait in his office for 25 minutes while he was on the phone, then he hung up the phone and turned to me. He said, “Pretty good script. Um. What do you think of making Kate a man and what do you think of so and so playing it?”  I said, “Go fuck yourself.” He said, “Have a nice day,” and I left his office.

I called my agent and said, “Please don’t fire me.” They didn’t. Now, independent of that, I know there were challenges in the reality of film-making. It’s incredibly dark material, decently expensive film, and I’m sure they had those struggles – Molly Smith and Trent Luckinbill at Black Label Media. They read it. They really responded, and jumped in with both feet and didn’t care, they attacked it aggressively. Lionsgate came on board, they did the same thing, and everyone embraced it. So, if there were other internal, separate conversations with regard to the character of Kate, I wasn’t privy to them. I know Denis would never have wavered on that. I went through extreme lengths when I wrote Kate. The thing about that character, is she’s incredibly passive. She’s victimized at every turn. It took a lot of care, and tremendous talent on the part of Emily Blunt, for a character who doesn’t get to do much, but complain and argue, yet to give that soul, and to be victimized without being a victim. It’s incredibly hard. I knew from day one it was going to take a beast of an actress to pull it off, and she did. There were more conversations about trying to strengthen the character than there were to change the character’s gender. For those reasons I just pointed out. I think the biggest argument I made was let’s not write a character that does more, let’s hire an actor who does more with the character because she needs to feel as stunted and as stunned as we are at what she sees. She has to be the eyes of the audience. She has to say the things we’re thinking. It’s how I keep the audience in the dark, is by keeping her in the dark. Emily did it with incredible grace and I’m just awed by what she accomplished.

AD: Completely. I loved the journey we go on with Kate, the unraveling of her.

TS: It’s really the deconstruction of that character. The entire screenplay was built to destroy her, emotionally. Through that deconstruction recognize the real toll of this. At the end of the film what she learns about herself, is her compass will not move to allow her to effectively fight this the way they fight this. That’s what she learns about herself. If you won’t move your compass and you try to fight this, you will die. That’s what she recognizes. She learns her boundaries, and at the end, that’s what the film is about. You can show someone hell. You don’t even have to factor in that the end justifies the means because there is no end, there’s just means. It’s a catharsis when she recognizes in herself that she doesn’t have that demon in her, and that’s a liability.

AD: Thank you. I really like that. So, what about the research that you did for this? Denis says you were the go-to person if he had questions.

TS: I did a lot of research. It’s a subject that I’ve been fascinated by for years before I had written the screenplay. I was very well-versed on the subject from the beginning, rather than coming up with the story and then beginning the research. I was fascinated with what’s happening along the border. Also, with the use of the military as they become an arm of justice, rather than a tool of war. Both of those things are really interesting quandaries that I wanted to explore. I spent a fair amount of time in Arizona, at the border, and I spent a lot of time reading.