Deadwood

This was always a risky idea, largely because film days with 250
extras must be planned long before the weather forecast is known.
In the mountains of the American West, I don’t think locals look
any more than 72 hours ahead for an accurate forecast and that is
simply too small a window to put together a production like this. On
this occasion, there was a month of planning – all looking towards
a specific day in mid-January. I had a demanding wish list: fresh
snow, but not snowfall on the day of the shoot, and decent flat light,
rather than a cloudless day, with all the starkness and nasty
shadows that would give. As it turned out, the weather was ideal
and that allowed for detail and the depth of field that was integral
to the idea.
I don’t ever try to be too earnest in my revisionism, I would
rather be playful and add my own interpretation, just as the Coen
Brothers did so masterfully in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Equally, I wanted to convey that the Wild West was a tough
place where an early death was accepted as part of daily life
and deadly confrontations drew crowds as opposed to outrage.