AMC+ is bringing spaghetti westerns back with their new series That Dirty Black Bag. Premiering on March 10, 2022, the gritty homage to the genre stars Dominic Cooper (Preacher, Spy City) as Sheriff Arthur McCoy, a man with a closet full of skeletons. Douglas Booth (The Dirt, Mary Shelley) plays Red Bill, a bounty hunter who prefers to chop off the heads of his victims rather than lug around their weighty bodies.
And FYI – the show’s title is a reference to Red Bill’s favorite decapitated head carryall.
During the 2022 Television Critics Association’s winter press tour, Dominic Cooper said the cast was fortunate to have had plenty of time to get ready for the series. Their preparation included watching spaghetti westerns to immerse themselves in the genre.
“We felt like kids in a candy store in that we were playing out a childhood dream,” said Dominic Cooper. “It obviously felt quite daunting sometimes to see all the classics and the actors that we respected and the work and the director’s work we respected. And we obviously wanted [it] to have its own sense and feeling. You try not to copy but you want to emulate…but you don’t want to impersonate other people’s performances from the past.
It must seep in somewhere; you can’t help it. But I certainly wasn’t watching things to steal looks and silences and then looking into the distance, in the hope that I’d replicate some wonderful performances from the past.”
Cooper added: “We watched everything and we watched it together. And we spoke about it a lot. We did our research with the directors and the actors.”
The connection to classic spaghetti westerns extended to filming locations. That Dirty Black Bag shot scenes at Fort Bravo where many of Sergio Leone’s movies were filmed.
“When we were doing our horse training, we could ride from one classic film set to another,” said Douglas Booth during the TCA panel. “You would be in a Western town and the next minute, you’d be outside a little church in Mexico. So that was quite fun. You’d watch the movie the night before and then doing the horse training the next day, you’d be riding around the sets. That was very cool.”
The shooting locations also helped capture the vastness of the Wild West in the same way classic Westerns brought the era alive on screen.
“[…] The feeling of the space – it’s so visually stunning and it goes on and on forever, these dry, rolling hills that you’ve built completely like you’re in the Wild West. It doesn’t feel like you’re in Europe at all,” said Booth. “So you can see why, historically, people over many years, have come there to make these iconic films.”
Italian filmmaker Mauro Aragoni (Nuraghes S’Arena) created the series and co-wrote the eight-episode season with Silvia Ebreul, Marcello Izzo, and Fabio Paladini. Dominic Cooper said the cast trusted the writers, directors, and producers to capture the genre’s tone while also creating something original.
“Of course, we wanted to replicate and play our childhood dreams out but we also wanted to be part of something that was new, fresh, and had a reason to be being made,” explained Cooper. “And I think that all those reasons were given to us by the producing team and the directing team, and it had a very, very distinct style. It was, yes, an homage to the spaghetti western, but it was clearly its own thing. And we all agreed that when we read it, it was one of the only things … you read a lot of material … and this, you couldn’t help but want to know what was happening next. That’s my experience, and I seem to remember us all saying the same thing about this particular piece of material.”
Dominic Cooper revealed in addition to working during the Covid-19 pandemic, Mother Nature decided to interrupt production with an abnormal amount of rain.
“They had a very wet season and within literally over the space of a night, we had rainfall, and our landscapes that were dry and arid suddenly became lush and green,” said Cooper. “And, again, our wonderful DP was struggling to find… We were really working day to day with finding new locations very quickly to make sure that it continued to look dry and arid because it was ever-changing.
I think that that sensation of being able to get even more impressive, wonderful, stunning backdrops which after a moment of watching, you have to keep reminding yourself that, ‘Oh my God, look at the background. Look where we are…’ It really is very cinematic and beautiful but we were on the move all the time and short of time – and, of course, filming during Covid. We respect everyone involved who managed to get this series made.”
Circumstances made it extraordinarily difficult to shoot That Dirty Black Bag and Cooper’s impressed with everything they managed to pull off in a short space of time and amid a pandemic.
“We’ve only just seen the final cuts of the first two episodes, and I knew we were making something that we were going to be proud of,” said Cooper. “The one thing about it is we were all fighting for the same thing, which was to make a wonderful show in a difficult time. And every so often we’d see little snippets of what we were making through the lens, through the camera, through the monitor, and we’d go, ‘Wow! This is worth kind of the sweat and tears of being out here for this amount of time.’”
“I think that especially we had a wonderful, wonderful DP that made sure everything looks as phenomenal as it does,” added Cooper. “It’s so collaborative, almost more than anything I’ve ever worked on. And us as actors, again, we all had time to really talk through who these characters were and to try and make them as interesting as we possibly could for ourselves and hopefully for the audience. And I think this show is very different from anything.”
Douglas Booth echoed Cooper’s praise of director of photography P.J. Dillon who shot all eight episodes. “It was amazing to have on a show like this where normally you’d have different DOPs coming in and out, to have someone as talented as him,” said Booth. “His star has been rising for a very long time. But to have to really sort of play it totally from beginning to end – I think that gives the show a real authentic look and style.”
