Scottish spaghetti Western film funded and led entirely by women

The National

a day ago

Spaghetti Western, which Fox promises will be rich with many much-loved Hollywood ingredients including some good old-fashioned gun-toting outlaws, Sheriffs, wagons, saloons, bar brawls and shootouts, will be 'very different' from your usual cowboy films.
The Wild West movie will have a very special flavour, Sicilian cooking, inspired by a big bowl of pasta which was served to Fox at a restaurant.
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'Honestly, I wish it was a more romantic reason, but I was in an Italian restaurant, and I was looking down at my bowl of pasta, and I thought, 'oh my God, this is so good',' she said.
'And then I thought, 'why didn't cowboys eat this'?
'Because pasta's super light, they could have carried it on the trail, and then I started wondering if tomatoes and basil and all those ingredients would grow.'
Fox (below) went on to explain that she looked at the soil composition of Sicily and the American Southwest and found that it was very similar, along with the weather, which then got her thinking about creating a real Spaghetti Western film.
(Image: Colin Hattersley)
'I started dreaming that there was this guy who had dreams of going and becoming a cowboy at the height of cowboy culture, and this poor woman was kind of thrown into his dream, and it really becomes about her story,' Fox added.
Spaghetti Western is set in 1881 when Elena Fardella, a young Sicilian widow, finds herself thrust into the battle for control of the remote, dust-blown town of Eden, New Mexico.
Her only weapon is her skill as a cook and determination to use food to bring people together.
Fox said that she wanted to explore the cultural melting pot, which was the wild west through food in her film, breaking down stereotypes and tropes the cowboy genre has long clung to.
'You start realising that the cowboy culture that we know now, which is kind of the typical rugged individualist male cowboy, it's not really true,' she said.
'The wild west was full of immigrants, and those immigrants brought their own culture to the wild west, and that started becoming cowboy culture.
(Image: Colin Hattersley)
'It was a collaboration of all different kinds of ethnicities.'
The entire project is female-led and aims to be fully funded by women – with a sizable portion of backers being Scots.
Along with London-based producer, Diana Phillips, Fox believes it's essential to have more films created from the female gaze and with female financing.
Fox, who is best known for her award-winning movie Stella and her romantic memoir Three Things You Need To Know About Rocket, said she has been lucky throughout her career to work with a lot of talented people who believe in her work, but they have been predominantly male.
The filmmaker explained that the more she wondered why the screen industry is so male-dominated the more she realised that history is often seen through the lens of people who don't get to tell it.
Fox said: 'It's a sector that's overwhelmingly dominated by men. Men decide who and what to fund, the films and TV that we watch, and our cultural narratives. Even the films with female central characters are largely made through the male gaze.