How do you make a film set in a world where reporters are routinely executed for asking the wrong questions? How do you track the flood of illegal drugs across the border from Mexico into the US when nobody – from law enforcement agents and government officials to cartel members – is prepared to talk?
It’s a testament to the tenacity of screenwriter Taylor Sheridan that Sicario, a thriller that plunges viewers deep into the bracingly violent world of Mexico’s drug trade, is as bruising, authentic and unflinching as it is.
His route into this closed world came through the ordinary people whose lives have been transformed beyond recognition by the drug trade – particularly the migrants desperate to escape the increasingly chaotic situation by crossing the border to the US.
Texas-born Sheridan grew up at a time when weekend trips down Mexico way were still fairly common. The inspiration for Sicario, (the title is slang for “hitman” in Mexico) came when Sheridan realised “that Mexico doesn’t exist anymore. The Mexico someone could just drive down into is gone. It’s become this lawless place.
“At the same time, I realised I hadn’t seen any movies about how life in northern Mexico has changed, how it has become dominated by drugs and corruption, how the cartels have become militarised and how the machine of the American government has been dealing with these problems that are spilling over the border.”
The second crucial story breakthrough was Sheridan’s idea for a central character. Serious, by-the- book FBI agent Kate Macer (played with conviction by Emily Blunt) is as close as this film comes to having a moral compass.
When she is co-opted into a top-secret undercover government operation, alongside morally ambiguous characters such as black ops specialist Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) and gung ho CIA agent Matt (Josh Brolin), she finds that all of her certainties are called into question. Blunt says of the character: “I was intrigued by her need to always do things the right way, by the law. When she gets thrown into this incoherent world of CIA ops and cartels, it is completely alien to her.”
Kate’s dilemma is one of the elements that attracted the Oscar- nominated director Denis Villeneuve to the project: “Sicario’s moral choices fascinate me. How far should we go to stop the cartels? Can we stop the cartels without becoming like them?”
But alongside the delicate ethical questions, the making of the film threw up some rather more fundamental challenges. Capturing the atmosphere of the Mexican
border city of Juárez, one of the riskiest on Earth for outsiders, was one. Although the production didn’t actually film in Juárez, they spent a taut six hours location scouting there, accompanied by machine gun-toting undercover police or “federales”.
Producer Edward McDonnell recalls: “I remember asking the federales, ‘What’s the good part of town?’ They said: ‘The good part of town is where they’re not killing anyone, and the bad part is where they are killing somebody.’ There really is no safe part of Juárez.”
The Juárez sequence culminates in a brilliantly executed shootout on the iconic Bridge of the Americas, at the border crossing from Mexico back into the US. Since the Department of Homeland Security was not prepared to close down the real bridge for a movie, production designer Patrice Vermette built a replica, complete with oil stains, artificially aged tarmac and 14 lanes of traffic.
In another coup for the production design, Vermette re-created a system of secret tunnels that run under the border and are used by the cartels to conceal the flow of narcotics and money.
It’s a chillingly effective setting, authentic down to the discarded sandwich wrappers, hard hats and bales of drugs. Vermette’s solution to creating realistic drug packages was particularly ingenious: they are made from shrink-wrapped hamster bedding. The prosaic origin of the props doesn’t stop this being the most visceral and nailbiting sequence you’ll see in a cinema this year, in a film that realistically portrays a plethora of problems, for which there are no easy solutions.
“The world is grey, not black-and- white,” says director Villeneuve, “and the notion of good and evil is oriented by one’s cultural and geopolitical background. Is there a solution to the continuing growth of the drug trade? Sicario raises a lot of questions, but it leaves the answers open.”
Sicario is released on 8 October.
