Buried beneath blood, bullets and the pressures of being a family man, Cliff (Scoot McNairy) finds himself in a tough spot at the beginning of Rod Blackhurst‘s snow-capped noir Blood for Dust. Unfolding in Montana in the early 1990s, Cliff, a struggling traveling salesman, has his dull, daily life punctured by a chance encounter with an old colleague, Ricky (a wily Kit Harington), that diverts his path from hocking hospital equipment to flipping guns. His reluctant life of crime finds him bumping shoulders with the likes of Ethan Suplee, Stephen Dorff, and Josh Lucas, each one representing a domino destined to collapse on Cliff, who must navigate his suppressed past, a family in flux and just making it to the next sale.
To celebrate the film’s digital release in the United Kingdom, I had the chance to talk with Scoot McNairy about how he got involved with the film, the cinematic and sociopolitical influences that shaped his approach to the main character and how it shares common themes with his other 2024 roles.
Alex Lines for Film Inquiry: How did you get involved with the film?
Scoot McNairy: I had seen the Amanda Knox documentary that Rod Blackhurst had made way back in 2017, and I reached out to him and just said, “Hey, I thoroughly enjoyed your documentary. I thought it was really beautiful, really well-done, and if you have anything lined up, I would love to work with you on something.”
A few years later, he sent me the script for Blood for Dust and a couple other things, and we settled on Blood for Dust and then off to the races. It took us about two or three years to get the film made. I just was really chomping at the bit to work with Rod.
AL: You’re someone that’s worked with a ton of great directors: David Michod, Andrew Dominik, Quentin Tarantino, etc. When you’re working with Rod, who comes from a documentary background, on their first feature film, how do you feel that your experience working with all these different directors informs how you build a relationship with someone who is more newer to the scene like Rod?
SM: That’s a really wonderful question. What I did learn from Steve McQueen, Andrew Dominik and David Fincher is that they’re very collaborative. They want to hear a lot from the actors, their opinions and thoughts.
They are still the storyteller and the puppet master, but at the same time, they want a lot of feedback from the actor. I picked that up from Rod as well really quickly. I feel that the collaborative process as an actor is so important and so necessary, so I just knew through his script and other things that he had it. I had full confidence that Rod was going to make a really great film.
AL: 2024 was quite a loaded year for you. One of the things I noticed with most of the characters that you played, between Nightbitch, Blood for Dust, and Speak No Evil, is that they’re forced into these very reactionary positions. They have to adapt and match the energy of the film’s central antagonistic force. In terms of your approach, how much do you feel is dictated by your initial read of the character and the script versus the rapport and interplay that develops as you make the film?
SM: Great question, and I’ll do my best to answer it. What I’ve found to be a common theme with myself to keep a character interesting, is to relate it to a theme that’s based on the subtext of the story. For Cliff, it was relating to the economic and COVID medical crises that this country and the world was going through at the time.
I latched onto what one would do to save his family and the sacrifices that he would make. There’s always something in a character that I’m trying to latch onto that’s personal or in the message of the film and use that to make a poignant idea or point in my performance. It’s just something that I keep in the back of my mind: Why are we here today? Why are we doing this movie? What’s the point of this movie? What are we trying to say through the actions of the character without saying it?
AL: Another common thread I found is that there’s a real cat-and-mouse quality to the roles — with Nightbitch, that is a bit more literal — and these films have a backbone of family as the driving force. Is this a quality you’ve noticed when choosing these projects?
SM: No, but I am a father, so it’s something that I am familiar with. My family is very important to me, but the themes that I latch onto, say in Speak No Evil for example, [are] more involved with the tech world and social media, in that we feel so comfortable to say things so incredibly inappropriate on a computer, a phone or a social media platform. It’s these little bitty themes that I latch onto.
There is a family in the backbone of these things, but what’s more important in the story is the subtext, of what’s being said about motherhood or the context of us being in the family position or our general dynamic. The messages in these films are all completely different.
AL: We’re talking about Blood for Dust‘s U.K. digital release, and the film came out in America last year and you shot it back in 2022. With a couple of years in between making the film and us speaking today, what would you say are your major takeaways from making Blood for Dust?
SM: That’s a hard question for me to answer. I can tell you that while we were making it, we were not able to predict where the future was headed. This film was made almost three years ago and was a reflection of the crises that we were going through with COVID and everything. A lot of families were really struggling, which made these themes very poignant at the time.
AL: Speaking to the film’s style, there’s a great Coen brothers quality to the whole thing, as well as Andrew Dominik, who you’ve worked with a couple of times. As an actor, are there any influences that you brought with you to the film that, at first glance, someone might not quite catch on to?
SM: The Coen brothers are masters. Andrew Dominik is a master. These are some of the guys that we all really look up to as filmmakers and storytellers. It speaks to how much we love the Coen Brothers and these other masters that we’re always gonna somewhat emulate their projects because we love their movies so much.
Even if you tried to make a completely different film, there’s always gonna be something that bleeds in because we’ve watched their movies so many times and love their projects. It’s more of a wink or a hat tip to them to say thank you for teaching us so much about film and for making movies so great that we want our movies to be just as good. Those are the things that we bring with us unconsciously because they’ve had such an effect on us.
AL: That brings me to an inverse of my earlier question. When you and Rod get together to make Blood for Dust, are there any films of yours that Rod was pulling from when shaping the character?
SM: That’s a really good question. You’ve got some great questions. I think that there was a conversation between me and Rod that Cliff would be a bit bookish at the start, because I don’t like it in movies when a guy is completely unable to do anything and then when he’s called to the problem or the action, all of a sudden he becomes a superhero.
I didn’t want to make him so inept or without the abilities to do the things that he does because it becomes not real or grounded. We decided to not make him such a nebbish character in the beginning, as to make it believable that he would actually try and do a drug run, that he would go out of his element and do the things that he does over the course of the film.
AL: I think there’s an expectation now, as seen in most modern action films, for your character to just go full John Wick at the end of the film.
SM: Yeah, that was something that James McAvoy brought up on Speak No Evil. I thought that was really great character, because it was a character that’s just weak, you know what I mean? You can find strength within that weakness, but you can’t just all of a sudden be a hero at the end of the movie — it’s just not real and not believable.
AL: Speaking to the future, now that we’re entering 2025, what have you got coming up?
SM: I’m currently working on a show right now for Netflix called Man on Fire. I’ve also got two films coming soon, one of them is called Fairyland, a film I’m really proud of which we’re trying to get it released. The other film is called East of Wall, which should be probably coming out this summer.
Film Inquiry would like to thank Scoot McNairy for taking the time to talk with us!
Blood for Dust is now available to watch on VOD platforms in the U.K.
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