From Marilyn Monroe's River of No Return to Robin Williams's Runaway Vacation, and much else, movies filmed in Alberta have run the gamut in both subject matter and quality. But no genre has become more closely identified with the province than westerns, films in which the prairie landscape isn’t just a backdrop, but an integral part of the story as well.
Cowboy culture may figure prominently in Alberta’s history, but some see it as a hokey blot on a more cosmopolitan present. Chad Oakes, however, isn’t among them. Westerns have comprised a small fraction of the more than 40 films Oakes has produced with Nomadic Pictures since he co-founded it in 1995. But they hold a special place in his heart nonetheless.
“Growing up in Calgary, the western genre is in our blood,” says Oakes, a Calgary native. “Robert Duvall told me ‘Chad, the Russians have Chekhov, the British have Shakespeare. The Americans and Canadians, we own the westerns.'"
The Last Rites of Ransom Pride, Oakes’s sixth Western with Nomadic, may not rank alongside Hamlet, but he’s still happy with the reception it’s received. The film seems like a logical choice for the Calgary International Film Festival’s closer, but it’s found fans in more unlikely settings as well.
“We were on the opening night for the Edinburgh Film Festival and it was so wildly accepted that they ended up booking another night and that sold out,” he says. “And then they booked another night and that sold out and they ended up giving us (a spot) in the top three best of the fest awards, so we’re very, very happy.”
Set in the Tex-Mex border region in 1910, Last Rites follows a woman (Lizzy Caplan) travelling home to recover and bury her murdered lover, while battling characters including a misanthropic preacher (Dwight Yoakam) and an evil Mexican witch (Cote de Pablo). In keeping with the western tradition, there’s plenty of shoot-’em-up scenes, but Oakes was attracted to the film partly because he sees it as a break with classics of the genre.
“‘This is not your granddaddy’s western,’ that’s the tag for the movie,” he says. “It had a really hip, cool writing style to it, and we could visualize seeing that it gets executed, seeing that it’ll attract great talent, and seeing that this would actually get financed and made.”
Oakes credits a combination of appropriate scenery (the badlands of the Drumheller area stand in for the border region in the film) and attractive tax credits with making Alberta a natural filming location for westerns. Unlike some of his counterparts, he’s quick to praise provincial Culture and Community Spirit Minister Lindsay Blackett (who ruffled some feathers recently when he said many of the productions his ministry funds are “crap”), for his efforts on the film industry’s behalf. But the government, he feels, can’t shoulder the burden of promoting the province alone.
“It’s important that the Alberta producers get off their asses, head to L.A. or to Europe, find the appropriate partners, and figure a way how to do it,” he says. “You cannot rely on your provincial government to provide you with 100 per cent of the financing on any film.”
But if people are willing to give Alberta a look, Oakes believes, they’ll like what they see. Last Rites, he hopes, will benefit not just his company but Alberta as well.
“We hope that every success for Nomadic Pictures, and for the Alberta film community, will encourage other Alberta producers, other Canadian producers, other European and American producers to come to this beautiful province.”
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