Virginia City, Montana – 2023

“We know this bar well and know that in the middle of the day there is enough window light to work with. In our experience that is most unusual for an inside shoot, especially when we need to freeze a moving animal. That is why we keep returning to the Pioneer Bar high in the mountain of Montana, it is quite simply the best saloon bar we know in the whole of the US.

We mix things up in our storytelling at the Pioneer and some ideas work and some don’t. This one is, however, gold dust. My fellow Brit Charlie March did a grand job as the rakish cowboy at the bar; he holds court in a manner that suggests he is there everyday and doesn’t really care too much about what is going on in the outside world. As long as he could have a smoke and a whisky, Nixon could do whatever he wanted. Watergate was not going to impinge on his day.

Life also goes on as normal elsewhere in the bar, the barman pours a beer whilst cowboys fight. My story was that this is a town cut off from current affairs and all the better for it. The wonderful reality is the fact that Virginia City is exactly like that. They really don’t care what happens in Washington so long as it doesn’t affect them. The folk up here probably couldn’t spell woke and they certainly don’t know what it means.”