The story of territorial expansion on film has always been one of glory and heroism. Featured prominently in countless Westerns, its depiction tends to lack the real violence and depravity inherent in this takeover. In The Settlers, director Felipe Gálvez Haberle gives a much more sobering and harrowing account of what that kind of colonization really means. Set in the early 20th century in Chile, the film follows three horsemen hired by José Menéndez, a wealthy landowner, to mark out the perimeter of his vast land in Patagonia. Along the way, they meet other men who have tried and failed to rule over the land and the natives who have nearly been run off of their land. Felipe Gálvez Haberle sat down with Borrowing Tape to talk about the future of the Western, historical revisionism, and Chilean cinema. The Settlers is now showing in UK and Ireland cinemas.
[This interview was conducted with an interpreter and transcribed]
I'm Sofia Sheehan of Borrowing Tape, and I'm here today with Felipe Gálvez Haberle, the director of the haunting western, The Settlers. Congratulations on your movie, by the way. My first question is about the title. Now, the word settlers is a much less divisive, seemingly less violent word than maybe colonizers, something like that. Was this a conscious misdirection?
I wasn't going for a strong term with the use of that word. Rather, my focus was on making it plural. It's a choral film, so I didn't want to focus on there being one type of settler, but the fact that there could be many; that was a focus.
The film has such a beautiful landscape. It uses it so well. Where was it filmed, and how long was the principal photography?
It was filmed in Tierra del Fuego, on an island, and the filming took four weeks.
Making a Western in this day and age, it feels like you have to change a lot from the original genre. How did you go about adapting a Western for an even more modern, subversive audience?
Rather than adapting or changing the genre's style, I wanted to focus more on the kind of pages that have been torn or erased from history. It was about filming scenes that might be censored or excluded from a traditional Western. First and foremost, I was seeking to create a classic. I wanted iconic scenes. It's a very self-aware, cinephile film. I wanted many references to other films, include references to dialogue in other films, to choice of clothing, outfits, actions, and scenes from other films. It's a film that's always in dialogue with other Westerns and with other war films.
Now, you've had a lot of experience in the film industry, mainly as an editor. What made you decide to direct, and how is this experience different from your first solo feature film?
Yeah, it was. I'd always wanted to be a director, especially a film director, but that's a difficult path to pursue. It was really hard making it as a director, and this is my first film. But before that, I was an editor. I had lots of experience as an editor, and that's where I felt comfortable because I'm quite a hermetic, solitary kind of guy. I don't like the crowds you get on set. I prefer being an editor because you're alone, with the director. I'm much more comfortable there. This experience as an editor also helped me learn a lot about filmmaking: what others did well, what others did badly; I could learn from their mistakes and what worked. I also learned what worked well in the script. I used that experience to film this. So, when filming the sets, we managed to do them in very few takes. No scenes in the film actually took more than three takes. I'm also really selective when filming scenes. When I saw something wasn't working, we tried it once or twice, and if it still wasn't working, I just jacked it in, and we created a new scene. I never stick with something that's not working. It's my belief. This experience also helped me improvise. There was one scene in the whole film that didn't get included. There's also the scene with MacLenna shouting at Segundo, and it was improvised. I knew I needed arguments and tension between them. I went into this knowing what I needed. This was my first step as a director, and I hope to continue.
Are there any directors and films that inspired The Settlers?
Yeah, so I see it as a game. It's enjoyable to play with that. It's absolutely jam-packed with references. Some scenes have five references, different ones, and some are more well-known than others. But I wouldn't want to reveal which ones they are. You could ask me, and I might tell you; I might not.
Will do a bingo later and see if I can guess. Are there any themes or subject matters you see as really interesting to explore as a filmmaker, and any through lines you wanna continue?
Yeah, so what I like to explore is the different genres, more than through lines. So Western is an important genre, a propagandist genre, although it's not the only one. I like to study these different genres and think about making films using other genres, not Westerns. Perhaps other propagandistic genres throughout history. And going into those genres to deconstruct them from the inside, using their own rules and their own formats to deconstruct them from within. In terms of Westerns, if you think about revisionist Westerns, what they tend to do is they tend to change the behavior of the characters. And what I want to do, rather than change the behavior, is change the discourse itself.
Interestingly, you bring up propaganda because, at the end of the film, there's a scene where a government official uses film to create this, to further this false narrative, and it suggests a complicity not just with the government but with all fields of art in creating this — was this intentional?
Yeah, I think that film has definitely been kind of complicit in the genocides of the indigenous peoples in the 19th and 20th centuries. When I wanted to make Los Colores with The Settlers, I didn't want to put myself in this position of moral superiority and saying, oh, look, I'm better than other people. I wanted to say, rather, we're all doing this to take a self-critical stance and see how filmmakers, photographers, everyone in this industry, is also complicit in how we've taken part in colonization. We've been involved in producing propaganda, in promoting this idea that the killing of indigenous people is a factor that promotes civilization and increases the civilizedness of the world. And then we've also produced entertainment. We've developed stories that show Indians as the baddies and settlers as the goodies. I think it's important to question cinema, question film, and its capacity to rewrite history, because he who holds the camera also holds the pen. In terms of, they write the narrative; they say what happened.
Last question, what do you want audiences to take away from this film when the credits roll?
Yeah, so for me, reflections, doubts, questions. For me, the film wasn't trying to, I'm not trying to be a judge or an arbiter, nor am I trying to be a historian. I don't want to be that. I don't want to be either of those things. What I want to be is a film director, and I set out to provoke not in the sense of provoking just for the sake of it, to get a reaction, but in provoking, stirring up the audience so that they have questions and doubts and reflections. I want people to leave this film and talk about it, and the doubts it might have raised for them. Because people could very well go away and defend Jose Menendez; they could say it could justify what he did. They could say that's the price you have to pay if this is what you want. I want to leave the audience to decide with whom they want to empathize rather than telling them. I want to leave open questions.
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