A gripping tale of outlaws who make moonshine in the backwoods of Virginia during Prohibition, Lawless is based on Matt Bondurant’s novel The Wettest County In The World, which is the true story of the extraordinary exploits of his grandfather Jack and his two great uncles. Hillcoat was hard at work filming The Road – his brilliant adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s post apocalyptic masterpiece – when a colleague suggested he read Bondurant’s book.
“I was actually doing the scene with Robert Duvall in The Road and in the middle of nowhere and I got a call about this book that I had to read,” says Hillcoat. “I did read it and it was fantastic. I was looking for a gangster film to do, because I love genre films, but I couldn’t find a new take on it. And then I was told about this book, which was from the perspective of the people who created this kind of Al Capone-style gangster clan but in the backwoods. So I gave it to my right arm – my friend and collaborator Nick Cave.”
When Hillcoat passed it on, Cave was also immediately struck by the material. “The book is amazing – it’s a stone classic of American literature,” says Cave. “[It] had an original idea in that it was really about the foot soldiers, the worker bees, that create the very beginning of the whole process of this wave of corruption that goes up and up into the cities. And that’s the territory that most filmmakers make films about – the glamorous side of the whole thing. And here was this really beautiful book about the workers and that seemed new and interesting.”
Hillcoat’s film is influenced by some of the classics of the American gangster genre: Brian De Palma’s Scarface, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie And Clyde and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America. Although he was born in Australia, Hillcoat was inspired by growing up in North America, where he spent his time watching gangster movies whenever he could. “What I’m fond of with those films in particular is that they had really strong filmmaking and characters and performances, which seems to be excluded from certain genres now,” Hillcoat says. “Gangster films nowadays are more about pure action, not characters. So it was a special treat to have such rich characters and a story that deals with the consequences of violence – there is a lot of material in that.”
The Bondurant Boys were outlaws who ran a restaurant in Franklin County, Virginia – dubbed “The Wettest County In The World” because of the amount of illegal booze produced there during the Prohibition era – which was a front for their moonshine operation. Shia LaBeouf plays the youngest Bondurant, the ambitious, business savvy Jack, who is shielded from the violence but desperately wants to earn the respect of his older siblings. When the Bondurants’ bootlegging business is threatened by the arrival of a corrupt special deputy (Charley Rakes played by Guy Pearce), the family refuses to back down and a brutal war breaks out.
Lawless is, at times, graphically violent, but Cave believes that Hillcoat’s direction is never gratuitous. “I didn’t have that much interest in when it was actually set, it was more the flavour of the book that took me,” he says. “I loved the kind of classical love stories that were involved in the story and the excessive violence, and those two things coming together are what really kind of titillates me.
“I’m not that interested in violence per se in films, a lot of it is very tedious and boring, but there is something in the way that John deals with violence that I find really exciting, right from his early movies that no one even knows about. It’s very brutal, very quick, it’s all over very fast, but it leaves a huge mess behind, and that’s what excites me.”
For Hillcoat, working closely with Cave is an organic experience, different to the process of a lot of Hollywood films. “Film is such a delicate balancing act of so many elements,” Hillcoat says. “Nick is the sole writer (often scripts go through several different writers) and then it goes to the cast and it evolves in rehearsals, and then Nick comes back in at the end with the music. So there’s an extra kind of connective tissue there that for me is really special because most films aren’t allowed to have that.”
Cave supervised the music for Lawless, forming a band – including himself, Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, George Vajestica and David Sard, collectively known as The Bootleggers – as well as country and folk legends like Emmylou Harris and Ralph Stanley. “We didn’t want to make a worthy Americana-style soundtrack,” Cave explains. “It’s been done very well in things like O Brother Where Art Thou, so we wanted to stay as far away from that as possible. We started thinking about modern-day songs and creating an aural illusion by doing a bluegrass/hillbilly version of them, and then stretching the tone. I think that this is actually a very modern film in a way, because Prohibition still exists, and it still fails, with the so-called war on drugs and all of that stuff. So there was a kind of gleeful idea of fusing modern-day concerns, such as a Velvet Underground song about taking speed and amphetamine like White Light/White Heat, and doing it in a kind of bluegrass, authentic American style that seemed to pull the present back to the past in a very pleasing way.”
BY CHARLIE MCDENIS
