FOX Beat: Emily Blunt stars in new film Sicario

Twelve movies with the Coen brothers, including Fargo and The Man Who Wasn’t There. It’s an eight-foot-tall swagger of a performance and the film noticeably sags when he’s not there propping it up with his “ain’t it great?” grin. Directed by Ridley Scott and written by Cormac McCarthy, this tale of a lawyer who gets in over his head with the cartels after a drug deal goes bad wasn’t realistic, exactly-no human being has ever talked like Cormac McCarthy writes. “Nothing will make sense to your American ears”, he preaches to us through her, “but in the end you’ll understand”.

But where Traffic looked over-saturated and grainy, Sicario appears washed out and arid. It has a texture.

But Taylor Sheridan didn’t find that to be a compelling enough reason to shift his story’s focus.

Along that ride, the question of “How in the world is this movie going to end?” arises. There are so many unpredictable elements.

But still, your batting average with projects is so high. “For this film I studied a lot of footage”. “What I love is that that protection has been completely decimated by this book”. I will not do something that is surfing on the success of the first one. It’s that kind of connection with the material. Otherwise she’s accountable, same as you.

Q. What is it like to be handed a script with pages and pages of you saying nothing?

Oh, as a audience member. I’m just reading it as a story. What I know is that we had a real film crew. I’m into being moved. Pulling that string gets her yanked into a larger cross-agency task force swaddled in official hush-hush. “You know that if his heroine, Alice, gets out of Cartel-land alive, she might spend a few months in an asylum, but she’ll be back, hell-bent on seizing the foreground”. This seemed right up to date. The only problem I had was the lack of explanation as to how such a dedicated, smart, capable and – yes, attractive – woman decides to throw herself into a profession that seemingly makes her miserable.

Viewers haven’t seen this before, from the movies where the closest comparison is Jodie Foster’s steely Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, who’s able to master the sort of ambiguities that trip Kate up or from Blunt. But the film really was Kate’s. It’s something she’s learned to ask for. Have you started having those conversations yet? We couldn’t have a long extended scene in that SWAT house. I mentioned Jean-Pierre Melville to Denis. When they’re in Mexico in the vehicles, that’s all in Mexico City. Instead, we want to know what’s going on with this drug war, why mutilated bodies are hanging from Mexican bridges, and what Alejandro and Matt plan to do about it. Alejandro is clearly our best chance at knowledge and when del Toro is off screen is when Sicario feels most flat. There are powerful echoes of his magnificent border-state work in No Country for Old Men as well. No one even sees you. We worked out those two shots of the convoy coming back to base.

With all her Federal Bureau of Investigation training and accolades, Kate thinks she’s ready to take on the drug cartels and bring those responsible for all the death she’s witnessed to justice.

Lesson learned: next time, bring home more sauce. Some very interesting photographs.

Villeneuve, the Quebecois director of “Prisoners“, was more confident.

“The studio didn’t tell me, I had no idea”, the Puerto Rican actor told EFE in an interview.

Q. Do you intentionally switch up the types of films you’re in?

“They were remarkably honest with me”, Blunt said. What went into filming it?

Right. And obviously this was a different thing. That dinner scene changed a little bit from the script. In a way, it’s quite simple. And besides he had actually done a whole piece on the border once, in the ’80s, I think it was.

Did making Sicario turn you from a dove into a hawk? It’s just what you do, really. There’s nothing clever or fancy. This is what happens.