Amy Madigan, Chris Cooper Set for John Sayles’ Western, ‘I Passed This Way’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Academy Award winners Amy Madigan (“Weapons”) and Chris Cooper (“Adaptation”) are set to star in “I Passed This Way,” a Western from two-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker John Sayles (“Passion Fish,” “Lone Star”) that marks his first feature in more than a decade.

“I Passed This Way” will begin principal photography in the fourth quarter of 2026. Maggie Renzi, Alejandro Springall and Nadine Luque produce; film is being sold at the Cannes market by Latido Films, which is handling international rights film, and UTA Independent Film Group, representing North American sales.

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Also written by Sayles — his Oscar nominations were both for original screenplay — “I Passed This Way” is set in 1898 and turns on Ross McEwen, a cowboy who impulsively robs a bank and flees across the arid New Mexico Territory. 

As famed lawman Pat Garrett and his ambitious young deputy close in, Ross takes refuge at a remote Mexican homestead stricken by diphtheria. There he faces a desperate choice — leave the family to die and escape to Mexico, or stay and nurse them back to health, and go to jail. Ross must decide what kind of man he wants to be.

Cast also includes Thomas Mann, Ted Levine, Ron Perlman and Cameron Monaghan.

A Spanish-U.S. co-production, “I Passed This Way” will shoot in in the Canary Islands and Almería, Spain. It is based on Eugene Manlove Rhodes’ “Pasó Por Aquí,” serialized in The Saturday Evening Post before publication in 1927 as a novella and considered a masterpiece.

“Rhodes was a cowboy first, starting writing partly because the shoot-em-up movies he saw and dime paperbacks he read seemed so false, missed the key to the New Mexico he grew up in,” getting to know Pat Garrett, Sayles told Variety.

“In that dry and sparsely populated land, most people went out of their way to treat each other with repost and decency. If a stranger turned up at your ranch with an exhausted horse and an empty canteen, you offered food, water and rest with no questions asked. 

Sayles first read Manlove Rhodes’ novella during the first Trump administration, “when the president and the media forces who conspired to put him in power were appealing to our citizens’ worst characteristics – fear, racism, the idea that being a superpower justified any behaviour,” he said.

Sayles grew up watching Westerns, he told Variety. “The ones I appreciated most had a moral core to them, often valuing ‘justice’ over ‘law’ and presenting their protagonists with tough decisions.”

He ended: “I think these movies are important in developing the best aspects of the America character., and I think “I Passed This Way’ will be both a very welcome and useful movie to audiences around the world.” 

“In a world where trust in institutions is eroding, ‘I Passed This Way’ reclaims the Western to explore timeless questions of justice and responsibility,” its makers say, answering the question “Why now?”

A pioneer of a U.S. independent cinema (“Matewon,” “Lone Star,” “The Secret of Roan Irish”), Sayles career spans over 40 years. He has written over 70 screenplays.    

Maggie Renzi, has served as Sayles’ producer from 1983’s “Lianna,” while serving as EP on Girlfight and music videos by Bruce Springsteen. Alejandro Springall, a distinguished director (“Santitos”), also produced Guillermo del Toro’s “Cronos.” Nadine Luque has produced or executive produced dozens of films while monitoring production on over 200 project including projects directed by David Cronenberg, Phyllis Nagy,

Lars von Trier, Sean Penn, Sally Potter and Johnny Depp.