“If anyone can understand my politics, I’ve failed”: Taylor Sheridan’s Biggest Challenge for His $85M Movie Was to Not Pick Sides That Proved His Real Genius as a Writer

Sicario was, in many ways, the first film that introduced the mainstream audience to the brilliance of Taylor Sheridan as a scriptwriter. Denis Villeneuve, although present in the movie scene since the late 90s, was the only director who could have brought Sheridan’s twisted vision of complex human behavior to the screens without ruining the original story.

Those among the fans who hadn’t been aware of Villeneuve’s existence in the form of Polytechnique (2009) or Incendies (2010) surely sat up and took notice. Soon after, Taylor Sheridan and Denis Villeneuve became part of those rare handful of writer-directors whose names increased ticket sales just as much as any A-lister would. Ultimately, Sicario launched them both into the Hollywood stratosphere.

Taylor Sheridan Speaks to the Politics in Sicario (2015)

Taylor Sheridan enjoys a degree of artistic expression and respect in the industry one could only dream of. But a brilliance of his caliber is neither taught nor born out of necessity. Years of rotting away in B-grade shows with minimal screentime, bad writing, and poor pay, gave Sheridan enough incentive, experience, and motivation to bet all the chips on himself and take a leap of faith.

After going through hundreds of subpar scripts, the writer-director was at least aware of the tropes he needed to avoid in order to strive for excellence. With Sicario, Sheridan went above and beyond by doing his fair share of research and interviews on the subject. In an interview with Variety, he claimed:

Alejandro’s motivation for what he does, it’s understandable. It’s palpable, all that he’s lost. He was Kate before his family was killed. He was a federal prosecutor, by the book; do everything the right way and justice will prevail. And then it didn’t, in the most gruesome of ways. And he embraced the notion that the only way to win is to kill them all until maybe someone stops buying this garbage.

I’m a big believer in, ‘”If anyone can understand my politics, I’ve failed.” If you can get a sense of which side of the fence I’m on, then I’m not doing a service. I’m preaching, and that’s not my job. And I don’t have the answer anyway.

Rare as it may be to find a combination of good script and director these days, Sicario exists as a seminal example of brilliant writing and execution on both Taylor Sheridan and Denis Villeneuve‘s part. However, it was also the contribution of a stellar cast involving Emily Blunt, Daniel Kaluuya, Josh Brolin, and Benicio Del Toro that served justice to Sheridan and Villeneuve’s combined vision.

Taylor Sheridan Establishes His Dominance as a Writer

Every great writer-director in Hollywood has had a peculiar fascination with one genre or the other – be it Quentin Tarantino’s obsession with cinematic violence or Christopher Nolan’s with time. As such, Taylor Sheridan has been blessed with a keen eye for the great American Western and it is through that very genre that he has ultimately found his true calling in the industry.

After the blinding success of Sicario, the 2016 Western heist thriller, Hell or High Water won him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. A year later, his directorial debut with Wind River, which would predate his more fleshed-out idea of the Yellowstone universe, also got him recognized among the Director’s Guild of America.

In 2018, Sheridan negotiated a deal with Paramount to launch Yellowstone on their nascent streaming service, a series that continues to bear fruit to this day. With two prequels already released and two more spin-offs on the way, Yellowstone proves to be the goose that lays the golden eggs.

As for Taylor Sheridan, his inability to run out of groundbreaking ideas has supplied Paramount+ with series such as Mayor of Kingstown, Tulsa King, Special Ops: Lioness, Lawmen: Bass Reeves, Land Man, and many more. Starring A-listers and covering a wide variety of genres, Sheridan’s work seems far from finished as he sets out to develop 6666, 1994, 2024, and Empire of the Summer Moon within the next year.

Sicario is available for streaming on MGM+ and Prime Video.