Martin McDonagh and Steve Buscemi on Wild Horse Nine, the JFK Conspiracy, and Watching History Repeat Itself

On the cusp of the 1973 Chilean coup d’etat, a CIA bureau chief (Steve Buscemi) assigns two operatives and longtime partners (John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell) on a remote assignment to Easter Island. As they banter about conspiracies, mortality, and relationships, twists and turns take shape, providing the perfect playground for Martin McDonagh’s pet passions.

As Luke Hicks said in his Critic’s Pick review of Wild Horse Nine from Venice, “McDonagh wryly and dryly makes a joke of the CIA—more broadly, all US intelligence agencies—a reality that becomes truer by the minute in contemporary circumstances but has perhaps always been the case, simply with better dressing to dissuade the public in the past.”

Ahead of the film’s theatrical release beginning this Friday, we spoke with McDonagh and Buscemi about coming together for the project, how it related to McDonagh’s past work, CIA conspiracies, the unintentional parallels to 2026 geopolitics, and Buscemi’s underseen gems.

The Film Stage: Martin, You’ve got these great pairings of haunted men in your films, and the one that I thought of the most while watching this was In Bruges. There’s a kind of beautiful symmetry between films. Was the use of that framework intentional, or did it happen organically? Was that something you were consciously thinking about?

Martin McDonagh: I think it was sort of organic; it wasn’t a conscious replication of In Bruges. In a way, it felt like you could pull in the old In Bruges fans subtly—you know, two blokes arguing in a pretty strange place—but then slowly subvert that and take us to a much more political place that In Bruges definitely wasn’t.

Yeah. It feels like Wild Horse Nine is a film you could have only made later because there’s a softer, slightly more mature quality to it, whereas In Bruges is a little edgier, rougher, noisy, and youthful.

Steve, this is your first time working together. Martin feels like he’s kind of right at the center of a Venn diagram of other collaborators of yours: Coens, Iannucci, Tarantino. I’m just curious, what specifically drew you to his work? Was it any of those similarities that got you to Wild Horse Nine?

Steve Buscemi: He writes wonderful dialogue, and he writes great character pieces. His stories are told through the characters, and he often works with ensembles. And so that was exciting, and I got to hang out with him about four years ago when The Banshees was [at Venice Film Festival], and I got to hang out with him and Phoebe [Waller-Bridge], and we just really hit it off. It’s one of those things where we both said to each other, “Love to work with you,” It is actually rare that it actually comes true. So it was very exciting that this happened. I couldn’t be happier.

You had directed a film around then called The Listener, right?

Buscemi: Yeah, The Listener was there. It was playing out of competition, but I was there, and I got to see most of the films that were in competition. And yes, Banshees was my favorite film that I saw there.

Martin, another thread through your films is this fixation on the mid-to-late-century sins of America. Vietnam comes up a bit in some of your work, and I find it interesting how you use the JFK assassination as this specter that haunts the film. It’s the first domino in an imminent collapse. In crafting the story, was that the inception point, or was that something you folded in later after figuring out the overall framework?

McDonagh: I think that was folded in later, actually. I think it was more about examining what the CIA did in Chile first off, because Rapa Nui is a dependency of Chile. When I thought about them being CIA guys, that kind of fell into place. But then when I was talking about the crimes and misdemeanors—mostly crimes—of the CIA, the biggest one in my mind anyway is Dallas in ’63.

I don’t even know if it’s quite a reveal in the film so much as a lingering element that slowly unfolds regarding who these guys are specifically, and what Malkovich’s history is. I thought that was a wonderful way of setting the stage for it to feel like a movie of current times without being too on the nose.

McDonagh: Yeah, very much. When I was writing and making it, the goal wasn’t specifically to portray 2026 geopolitics and all that, but seeing it with an audience in the present day, you definitely feel those parallels. From then to here—when Venezuela happened just after we finished editing the film, it felt like history was completely repeating itself in a stupider and stupider way. One of the tragic things is that they’re not hiding it. These things used to be covert, but they don’t seem shamed enough to hide it anymore. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse, actually.

Steve, you have this wonderful, heartbreaking moment right near the end of the film where you say, “You know, some of us actually liked JFK.” There’s a peeling away of your character that culminates in being this kind of very empty, lonely person the same way that Malkovich’s character is. What’s your process to really pay a moment like that off, especially when you have more limited screen time? What kind of prep or work are you doing to thread that needle?

Buscemi: Yeah, there’s basic research that I did on the CIA, and Martin recommended a book. But really, most of it comes from the script and from Martin. And of course, knowing the JFK conspiracy, this is Martin’s take on it. But that was a very easy line for me to say about JFK. I was, I think, five years old when he was assassinated, but I remember the day. I just remember talking on the phone to my aunt. My mom was talking to her sister, and I wanted to talk to her—my aunt Lee, because I just loved her, and I wanted to tell her a joke. But my mom, she said, “No, I don’t think she wants to hear a joke right now, because John F. Kennedy was killed.” I couldn’t even take that in. And I think it was the next day or a day or two afterwards, I actually saw Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald live on TV. Like, watching that with my mother, you know? So that time period was very profound and potent. And then through the years learning about JFK and the work that he was doing and what he wanted to do, what his death meant for the nation. Yeah, that was pretty big in my life, yeah.

It’s such a wonderful payoff for your character. Steve, I always like to shout out hidden gems. Is there a film of yours that you wish more people could seek out and find, or that you want to shout out, that you’re particularly proud of?

Buscemi: I mean, some of the early work that I did with Alexandre Rockwell, In the Soup, I love. Tom DiCillo’s Living in Oblivion is a good one. My own filmmaking, Trees Lounge, is now 30 years old. We had it restored with this company, IndieCollect, and we’ve been having screenings, so yes, those three.

Wild Horse Nine opens in theaters on Friday, November 6.