Martin McDonagh directs Wild Horse Nine, about CIA agents on Easter Island

I read that Martin McDonagh, the author of "In Bruges", "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" and "The Banshees of Inisherin", has made a new film, Wild Horse Nine. John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell play the CIA agents Chris and Lee. In 1973 they have only just taken part in preparing the military coup in Chile and are now languishing on the island of Rapa Nui, otherwise Easter Island. Chris has cancer. He claims to know who killed John Kennedy and intends to write his memoirs, while his superiors fear that he will tell the story of the "Dallas chapter" of his life.

When McDonagh sat down to the screenplay, he wrote "GUILT" and "REGRET" at the top of the first page. He is 56, and he says that this is perhaps his first "old man's" film. McDonagh does not believe the official version of Kennedy's assassination. By his account, Lee Harvey Oswald was most likely involved in the killing, but the director does not believe that he fired the shots alone.

Malkovich has long been interested in the subject. In 1994 he staged "Libra" on the stage, Don DeLillo's novel about Oswald, studied Abraham Zapruder's amateur film of Kennedy's last seconds and inclined to the view that the conclusions of the Warren Commission are mistaken or mendacious. The Warren Commission investigated the assassination and decided that Oswald had acted alone. Malkovich says that around 60% of Americans do not believe this version. He confessed that he has not voted since 1972, when Nixon routed George McGovern at the election.

Malkovich and Rockwell describe how they ran through every scene no fewer than a thousand times, weekends included. Shooting on the island lasted six weeks. Malkovich missed his two granddaughters and says that the only diversion to be had there was swimming with turtles. Rockwell recalls evenings with Chilean wine, rum and pisco sours. We watch it together.