When Oscar-winning “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” filmmaker Martin McDonagh made his latest film, “Wild Horse Nine,” he was intently focused on telling a story about the CIA in 1973 and their actions in Chile. But now that the film is on the cusp of release amidst the Trump Administration’s aggressive actions abroad, McDonagh sees surprising parallels to his story set in a very different era of American geopolitics.
“When I wrote the film and when we made it, it was to talk about 1973, and Chile at that point. But watching it now, it does seem to have a bit of a commentary on present-day geopolitics and all that kind of stuff,” McDonagh said at a press conference at the Venice Film Festival, where the movie is having its world premiere. “It wasn’t necessarily deliberate, but I guess a lot of these things just naturally come in when you’re open to the subject matter. I think it’s gonna be fascinating to see how an audience takes something that is seemingly a historical piece but has tentacles and connections to what’s going on today.”
The “Banshees of Inisherin” filmmaker added that one major difference between the current era and the 1970s is, in his words, a lack of covert ops.
“I think for me one of the frightening things is they don’t seem to be making it covert anymore, which is very strange,” he continued. “In the ’70s, these people had the intelligence to keep their acts secret. But things are getting stupider and stupider and stupider.”
Set shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup and the death of Chilean President Salvador Allende, the film stars Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich as a pair of bickering CIA agents who are dispatched to Easter Island for a special mission. As happens in most McDonagh films, all does not go according to plan.
At the Venice press conference, Malkovich said, “I think it’s a film that with great humor addresses two very traumatic occurrences, one being the assassination of Kennedy and one being the death and the coup against Salvador Allende, and I think it does it with grace and intelligence and a kind of fairness as well.”
Searchlight Pictures will release “Wild Horse Nine” on Nov. 6, 2026.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misspelled Martin McDonagh’s name in the headline. It has since been corrected. TheWrap regrets the error.
