Two Warring Sisters’ Desperation Reaches Its Peak in Tom Berkeley & Ross White’s Bleak Western ‘The Golden West’

Oscar and BAFTA-winning directing duo Tom Berkeley and Ross White, previously featured on DN with their multi-award-winning short An Irish Goodbye, grace our pages again with another delightfully unconventional dark comedy The Golden West. When embarking on their directorial journey together the pair decided to make three shorts, with each subsequent project growing in ambition both narratively and production wise, while gradually turning up the dial on their dark sensibilities. The Golden West serves up everything you could want from those aims. Set in the unforgiving landscape of the Snowdonia mountains, two sisters, who have fled the horrors of the Irish famine, are struggling to find their fortune in the perhaps lesser-known Welsh gold rush. With standout performances by Irish actors Eileen Walsh and Aoife Duffin, their journey is anything but simple and isn’t helped any by a constant barrage of bickering which only increases in intensity as their situation worsens. Berkeley and Ross set their sights high, grounding the authenticity of their time period drama by shooing on 35mm film stock which perfectly matches the raw, gritty nature of their characters’ desperate plight. The Golden West is a gleeful subversion of the typical male stories dominating the Western genre and one that successfully hits its unexpected, enthralling beats. We invited Berkeley and White to join us here at DN again to talk about their propensity for unlikely protagonists, collaborating with a cinematographer with an expertise shooting on film and how working on that medium sharpened their storytelling process.

[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]

Firstly, a huge congratulations on everything you have achieved with An Irish Goodbye.

Ross White: It took on a little life of its own, gained this momentum and started to run away from us and we were just playing catch up the whole time. I think that made it really charming as we were so green to it all. Now, as academy members, it’s been interesting seeing all of the campaign and promotional emails come through as we did none of that for An Irish Goodbye. We were so clueless about it all and we just got very lucky that the film found its own way.

Did you feel any follow up intimidation when making The Golden West after that incredible success?

Tom Berkeley: No, because we made it before all of the madness kicked off. We were filming at the end of November, beginning of December before any of the shortlists or anything had even been released. And we were working on The Golden West for pretty much all of 2022. We wrote it very early on in that year and it took a long time to get the finance together as happens with short films. So our heads were buried in The Golden West for pretty much that whole year whilst An Irish Goodbye was off doing its thing on the film festival circuit. We were keeping an eye on it then very late in the day, it had this massive third, fourth wind and as Ross said, ran away from us. So with The Golden West, it was quite nice because we were approaching it without knowing what was to come which meant we were very much focused on it in and of itself.

The fact that we were shooting on film for the first time, working with animals and guns in the middle of the mountains in Snowdonia made it as difficult as we could within the short film form.

Ross and I didn’t go to film school and when we started making films together, we said we would try and do three in three years. We would start small and scale up. The idea being that each one would kind of grow in its ambition and how it was challenging us as filmmakers and The Golden West was supposed to be the culmination of that. The fact that we were shooting on film for the first time, working with animals and guns in the middle of the mountains in Snowdonia made it as difficult as we could within the short film form. We were really chuffed to be able to give ourselves that challenge.

Through your first short Roy, An Irish Goodbye and now The Golden West we can see a real propensity for dark comedy.

RW: To be honest we can’t avoid it, there’s something about the genre that speaks to us. Each of those three films sits on a different part of the scale of black comedy, moving darker as we go. For us, the tragic comedy thing feels very truthful. It’s not something we’re automatically aware of, it’s how we interact with one another and our back and forth dynamic as friends so it always sneaks its way in – even when we are doing a Western psychological thriller.

It is unusual to have a tale of two women in a time period where so much of the on screen representation is male. Did you always plan on telling this story from a female perspective?

TB: They were sisters from the get-go, really. Ross and I are both very much interested in our history such as the great hunger in Ireland and the gold rush, two global phenomena that were happening at the same time. As is the case with history, male stories are well documented and sadly, as you know, there are all of these fascinating, interesting stories from a female perspective that just aren’t recorded in history. So it was a bit of an exercise dreaming up these two characters that could have existed. Lots of women did go out and join the gold rush and of course, a million people fled Ireland during the famine so it was just us imagining a little pocket of what might have been when these two worlds collided. We’re quite drawn to unlikely protagonists and subverting within our protagonists as well, they are the most fun characters to write. I think about What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and that kind of embittered sisterly relationship you don’t expect to see descend into this madness, which made it all the more fun to write.

As is the case with history, male stories are well documented and sadly there are all of these fascinating, interesting stories from a female perspective that just aren’t recorded in history.

RW: There’s a brutality at the heart of it that felt really interesting. Against the grain of what we’d often seen in portrayals of sisterhood. You’re always looking for something that feels like a fresh perspective of that story. In the context that we find the characters it didn’t feel like we were trying to overdo anything, it felt so natural that you would be so desperate. It’s such a desperate situation, fleeing this famine where you’ve gone from absolutely nothing to trying to not just survive but thrive and find your wealth in finding gold. There are so many stories about gold miners and the hunt for gold because it’s so storylike in its essence. You’re literally on a mission, you’re looking for this piece of gold at the end of it.

The Golden West was shot in Snowdonia, how did it work getting your team and equipment and everything out there as it seems totally desolate as a shooting location?

RW: Desolate is absolutely the headline, it was so intense. We had a tiny little team of about 20 people and just had to be nimble. You’re in and amongst the mountains, shooting in November/December time so the weather was just brutal. It rained the whole time, it was frosty, windy and on our last day, our final shot, there was a massive hail storm that was going on around us when we needed to do the scene with the matches. So we had the whole crew huddling around our two actors while we were trying to light a match. But that’s the joy of short films, you don’t have the opportunity to shoot on another day because the weather is bad. It was pretty rough and ready and we stretched the budget and everybody’s capacity to the absolute nth degree.

You really get the feeling they’re in the middle of nowhere, then out of nowhere, a man comes along on a boat.

TB: At the start of the film, it almost feels like he is a figment of Fionnuala’s imagination and then by the end, when you leave him in that final scene, it’s as if they could have been a figment of his imagination. That’s an interesting purgatory to leave it in. We don’t have to decide or tell people either way.

So let’s talk about our two leads Eileen Walsh and Aoife Duffin. Their cantankerous chemistry is palpable and they bounce off each other so well.

RW: They have never worked together which is quite bizarre for the Irish industry, because most people have had an experience working with each other. We love working with actors with a grounding in theatre which they have both done loads of. Especially because we were shooting this on 35mm film stock we didn’t have take after take. We knew we needed people to come in, rehearse with us for two days and then just be ready to go. With a period piece, you’ve got to try and give it that weight and that lived in quality. They both just have this gravitas and they both took time to look into the history and really ground themselves in it. The performance that they gave and the chemistry that you mentioned is so much down to the work that they put in with us in rehearsal.

Because we were shooting this on 35mm film stock we didn’t have take after take. We knew we needed people to come in, rehearse with us for two days and then just be ready to go.

TB: They were a joy to work with. As Ross says, we really are drawn to people with a grounding in theatre and shooting on film is very much like theatre. You’ve not got the ability to go again and again so there was a lot of emphasis put on the live performance element of it.

Shooting on film always offers its own challenges, what determined that choice?

TB: We said from the get-go with the period quality of the film and trying to capture the grit of these landscapes and of the characters and the situation that they’re in it was a no-brainer. We’ve seen many films that have done film emulation exceptionally well and we could definitely have gone down that route but we wanted to stay as true to form as possible. Also for us as filmmakers, it felt like if there was ever a project for us to get to explore what it is like to shoot on film, this was the one to do it on. It was kind of the non-negotiable element and we were really thankful to get the likes of Kodak and Panavision, who are so supportive of emerging filmmakers who want to shoot in that format. They heavily discount film stock and processing costs for you.

When we worked out that it was going to be financially viable, we then had to work out how much we needed because you can’t get any more once you’re up the mountains in Snowdonia. You are stuck with the rolls that you’ve got so it was a lot of maths and a lot of working out what ratio we thought we’d shoot. I think we pretty much nailed it because we came back with one roll of film which we actually didn’t know existed. One of our producers hid this roll away from us, it was a safety backup, which was very clever of him because we would have definitely used it otherwise.

We especially wanted to work with Ebba Hult, our amazing cinematographer on this, because she worked so amazingly on film and really guided us through that process. She shot almost entirely the whole film in natural light with no time with a very tiny camera crew. When I look back at it now and I see it on the cinema screen, it’s just fantastic. I don’t think there was even one shot when we got to the rushes that was out of focus.

What do you feel that you both learned from the process of shooting on film?

RW: We’ve always been quite prep-heavy and quite intense on storyboards going into shoots, maybe because there are two of us and there are two brains working together. But I can’t imagine just going and freewheeling it with film stock. I think it makes it a non-negotiable to have your ideas and plan in place. I think sometimes that sounds like a negative thing, but what we found in the process is the more limitations you’ve got, the more creative it forces you to be and the more solutions you end up coming up with. It makes you a little bit sharper. Constantly being on your toes, the weather’s wrong, you’ve not got enough film stock, you maybe have six shots in your storyboard plan but your 1st AD and DP are saying you can only do three. It sharpens your storytelling focus to really economise the way you tell a story. There are lots of parts of this film where we had these grand ideas of “We’ll get a crane, we’ll swing down here” but the practicality of it meant we couldn’t do that which actually gives the film this grounded aesthetic with the characters and a subjective kind of feel that is quite important for this film.

What we found in the process is the more limitations you’ve got, the more creative it forces you to be and the more solutions you end up coming up with. It makes you a little bit sharper.

Was there anything that you wanted to capture that you weren’t able to?

TB: There are always things like that. We learnt from our previous films to try and get more interesting coverage. As Ross said, we did a lot of storyboarding and in retrospect, planned what might come under the brackets of luxurious mid-scene shots or those classic Western hip shots. Collectively, we were good at always making sure that we had enough to cut good versions of the scenes and then we would embellish with things after that. Sometimes the logistics of weather and other things come into play and you can’t get everything that you want but as Ross said, that forces a new kind of creativity. We wanted the boatman to be rowing a lot more than he was when you first meet him. He was originally supposed to be rowing up the river and singing and they just look back and forth at each other. However, when we got to the lake, which I think is supposed to be the coldest in Europe, we realised from a health and safety point of view there was no way we’re not going to let him do that.

You guys are in the trenches writing your first feature. What have you learned in the making of the three shorts which you are bringing to the table?

RW: We’ve learnt so much. Roy was our first time ever behind the camera and it has been such a journey to the making of The Golden West. The sensibility of our work will continue to evolve and develop but I think the heart of it has stayed roughly the same and I think that will come with us I hope. The kind of stories we love, as Tom said, tend to be unlikely protagonists, typically in the middle of nowhere in these rural hinterlands which we just find ourselves drawn to.

TB: Our feuding siblings theme continues, which probably says more about me and Ross in our duo than anything else. The feature we’re writing at the moment is hopefully a moulding of genre, slightly pushing and subverting. It’s a mix of a cabin fever type psychological thriller keeping that grounded family drama with a nice storybook black comedy quality that I think you know. The Coen brothers, Tarantino, Martin McDonagh influences are filtering through and watch this space. As you say, we’re right in the trenches at the moment but it’s nice to be back writing again and it’s definitely nice to be writing long form.