The veteran actor plays plays the legendary Wild West showman in a new drama opening April 10 in theaters and on digital platforms.
Eight years after he starred to perfection alongside Joaquin Phoneix in the acclaimed seriocomic western The Sisters Brothers, John C. Reilly is back in the saddle for Heads or Tails, a fanciful comedy-drama in which he portrays the celebrated Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody.
Based loosely — very, very loosely — on real-life events, the Italian-American coproduction, directed by Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis and set for an April 10 theatrical and digital release, finds Cody forced to live up to his self-manufactured legend while touring through Europe.
According to the press notes: “At the dawn of the 20th century, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show rolls into Italy, peddling the myth of the American frontier and sparking the imagination of Rosa, a young woman trapped in a stifling marriage to a powerful and violent landowner.
“When a rodeo between American cowboys and Italian butteri ends in tragedy, Rosa flees with Santino, the daring local rider who bested the Americans. But in a world where justice is sold to the highest bidder, Buffalo Bill and others join the hunt for the bounty on Santino’s head. Rosa’s dream of freedom quickly collides with the weight of reality — and like in every good Western ballad, fate flips a coin.”
“All the themes of myth-making, being the hero of your own story, what’s real versus what’s mystified in a story — this is what resonated with us,” said Matteo Zoppis. “We thought Buffalo Bill could actually represent that, because, in a way, he does. Who knows if they were all real, the stories he told? Who knows if he did exactly what he said? He was the protagonist of a lot of dime novels and adventures that had probably never occurred. And that’s why we made him the narrator of the film: Anything you see, you must question the reality of.”
“During our research,” Alessio Rigo de Righi added, “we came across some videos of Buffalo Bill just riding his horse, crossing a river, and wandering around, clearly aware that he was being filmed. It was moments like these that gave us ideas and helped us envision him as the unconventional chaser he becomes in the film.”
The real-life Wild West Show “was already a theatrical collection of popular stories,” said Zoppis, “with a good chance that the truth was bent to create a myth. The idea was to make a film that was aware of its own made-up nature, recognizing that it’s part of a long tradition of retold and reimagined stories.”
“It’s not a historical film,” de Righi acknowledged. “It’s mythical; it speaks about legends and how these characters move through them and survive. Or do not survive.”
While Heads or Tails was galloping across the international film festival circuit last year, Variety critic Guy Lodge hailed this “cheerfully deranged genre riff” as “an enjoyably off-kilter Euro-western that honors the stylistic and structural traditions of the genre while occupying its own reality entirely …
“[It] features a rogue outlaw cowboy, a gutsy, pistol-toting widow, and Buffalo Bill Cody himself — all variously on the loose in a suitably parched stretch of northern Italy. But if those sound like standard ingredients for an old-school oater, or even a Leone-era spaghetti joint, this sui generis item takes a turn for the eccentric even before it pivots into outright surrealism.”
