Location scouting began about a year before production. The complexities of these characters heighten when they are brought together as ultimately Phil and Peter form what appears to be an unlikely friendship, raising questions as to where true masculinity resides-in the hard-as-nails seemingly unfeeling rancher or the lad who harbors aspirations of becoming a doctor, all the while doted over by his mother. Phil’s disdain for her is evident-but perhaps even more so for her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a sweet dreamer of a kid who is the antithesis of Phil. She then moves to the brothers’ ranch to begin life with her new husband. Both are intelligent and somehow share a brotherly bond-but their worlds move closer to colliding when George meets, falls in love with and marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow who runs a desolate hotel. George is polite, sensitive and considerate while Phil is the polar opposite. While they share a bloodline, the two are profoundly different. Wegner immediately embraced the project, reading the book and discovering it to be “a powerful and intriguing story that really stays with you.” Campion’s western, which is also titled The Power of the Dog (Netflix), introduces us to brothers Phil and George Burbank portrayed, respectively, by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons.
Campion was in the process of adapting the novel for a screenplay and asked Wegner if she’d be interested in discussing it. Fast forward some three years and Campion reached out to Wegner about “The Power of the Dog,” the Tom Savage novel centered on two brothers in 1920s’ Montana. The two hit it off, making in just a couple of days what Wegner described as an aesthetic connection. The short-term collaboration took the form of a commercial after a mutual colleague brought Campion and Wegner together. Serra’s artistic philosophy: “Chivalry is the reasoning of action.For cinematographer Ari Wegner, the opportunity to work with legendary filmmaker Jane Campion initially came in a short burst and grew years later to a feature-length film which has garnered great acclaim on the current festival circuit. They include a moment in which Quixote advises Sancho to renew his strength through prayer, a scene in which the two stare up at the sky accompanied by a rare burst of mournful acoustic guitar music, and Quixote’s near-final summation of his beliefs, which could double as Mr. Serra’s vision, the film’s emotional payoffs are devastating. This film is a virtual definition of the phrase “acquired taste.” But if you invest yourself in Mr. This film’s opening section observes Quixote waiting for Sancho to fix a piece of his armor, then asking Sancho to make him a laurel wreath.
Quixote meanders in fields of tall grass, inspects trees, ignores flies crawling on his armor or stares off into the distance while Sancho sits patiently, awaiting orders. In adapting Miguel de Cervantes’s novel about the senile would-be knight, Don Quixote (Lluís Carbó), and his sidekick, Sancho Panza (Lluís Serrat), the film’s writer and director, Albert Serra, favors landscape imagery and natural sounds over dialogue and music. The “Don Quixote” adaptation “Quxiotic/Honor de Cavalleria” is composed of little else. Matt Zoller Seitz (The New York Times) wrote:Įlmore Leonard once said that the key to telling an exciting story was leaving out the parts that people skip.