McDonagh and Buscemi on Wild Horse Nine, the CIA and History on Loop

Martin McDonagh's Wild Horse Nine opens in US theaters on Friday, November 6, and its director says history has already caught up with it. Steve Buscemi stars as a CIA bureau chief who, on the eve of the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, sends two longtime operative partners — played by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell — on a remote assignment to Easter Island (Rapa Nui), a dependency of Chile.

The film premiered at Venice, where The Film Stage's Luke Hicks made it a Critic's Pick and wrote that 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."

Is this In Bruges, twenty years on?

McDonagh says the pairing of haunted men echoed his 2008 breakout In Bruges organically, not by design. "It wasn't a conscious replication of In Bruges," he told The Film Stage. "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."

The Chile material came first. "It was more about examining what the CIA did in Chile first off, because Rapa Nui is a dependency of Chile," McDonagh said. The JFK assassination entered later. "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."

How did Buscemi land the part?

This is Buscemi's first collaboration with McDonagh, though the director sits at the center of a Venn diagram of the actor's past collaborators: the Coens, Armando Iannucci, Tarantino. Buscemi traces the partnership to Venice about four years ago, when The Banshees of Inisherin screened and his own The Listener played out of competition. Banshees, he says, was his favorite film he saw there.

"He writes wonderful dialogue, and he writes great character pieces," Buscemi said of McDonagh. "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."

What does JFK mean to Buscemi?

Near the film's end, Buscemi's character delivers the line: "You know, some of us actually liked JFK." The actor says it was an easy line to say. He was five when Kennedy was assassinated, but he remembers the day — his mother telling him his aunt didn't want to hear a joke "because John F. Kennedy was killed." A day or two later, he watched Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald live on television with his mother. "That time period was very profound and potent," he said. His prep included CIA research and a book McDonagh recommended, but "most of it comes from the script and from Martin."

Why does the film feel like 2026 news?

McDonagh didn't write the film as contemporary allegory. "The goal wasn't specifically to portray 2026 geopolitics," he said, "but seeing it with an audience in the present day, you definitely feel those parallels." He pointed to events in Venezuela, just after the edit wrapped: "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."

Asked to name underseen gems from his filmography, Buscemi cited Alexandre Rockwell's In the Soup, Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion, and his own Trees Lounge, now 30 years old and recently restored with IndieCollect. A film about covert meddling from 1973, released into a news cycle its director barely had to exaggerate. That's timing nobody planned.