“Everyone Stayed Home to Watch Gus Die”
A conversation with Lonesome Dove director Simon Wincer.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 09/25/2009
So there was competition?
The book had won the Pulitzer Prize, and everyone who read the book just loved it. And there was this great adaptation floating around, so a lot of other directors wanted to direct it.
I didn’t realize it so much at the time because, you know, I was a bit younger, but I would have done anything to get it. (Although I didn’t have to fight as hard as I would these days to get a similar job....)
I remember saying to my wife, “This is one of those jobs that comes along once in a lifetime. I cannot say no to this.”
After directing The Lighthorsemen, how did you feel about another three months of critters and cowpies?
[Laughs] Well, I happen to revel in it, because I’ve been around horses all my life. I have a farm, and I ride every day of my life when I’m not working.
I’m actually in Queensland doing a live arena show called the Australian Outback Spectacular—I guess you have something similar called the Dixie Stampede. It’s a fantastic show that’s been very successful. I’m doing a new version of that which integrates live arena action with high-definition photography on a screen. It involves lots of horses and cattle and sheep and dogs and helicopters and everything else that’s fun.
Where in Australia do you live?
I live on a farm just outside Melbourne. You can see a bit of it—that’s where they interviewed me, sitting outside, for the recent Lonesome Dove DVD package.
How similar is Australia’s Wild West to America’s?
[Australia’s] gold rush came around 1854, so it was a similar sort of thing with people, flooding to the country and outback towns, from all over the world, in the rush to find gold. It was a real melting pot. Not quite as wild as the American West, I don’t think, but nonetheless guns were just stuck in belts and there were rough times and a lot of conflict with the police. We were still emerging from the days when we were a convict settlement.
Did your interest in Australia’s history inspire interest in ours?
My love for the American West really came from the Saturday afternoon serials—Hopalong Cassidy. I grew up in the fifties and sixties.... I’d been around horses all my life, and I loved the bush [rural region] too. It was a kind of natural progression.
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