Taglines: Everything has a price.
A prospector sells his wife and daughter to another gold miner for the rights to a gold mine. Twenty years later, the prospector is a wealthy man who owns much of the old west town named Kingdom Come. But changes are brewing and his past is coming back to haunt him. A surveyor and his crew scout the town as a location for a new railroad line and a young woman suddenly appears in the town and is evidently the man’s daughter.
The Claim is a 2000 British-Canadian Western romance film directed by Michael Winterbottom and starring Peter Mullan, Wes Bentley, Sarah Polley, Nastassja Kinski and Milla Jovovich. The screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce is loosely based on the novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy. The original music score is composed by Michael Nyman.
Primary filming took place at the Fortress Mountain Resort in Kananaskis Country, Alberta, Canada. Near the end of the film, in a scene where the character of Dillon is standing in the street and throws an oil can onto a burning building, you can see the tower, cables and chairs of a modern ski lift in the background. The decision to have the film’s dramatic burning of the entire town of Kingdom Come also served as a first step to fulfill the producer’s commitment to return the site to its original natural condition.
Some secondary filming took place in Colorado. The town that Lucia creates in the valley below Kingdom Come is not to be confused with the real town of Lisbon, California (now the unincorporated community of Arcade), located on the route of the Sacramento Northern Railway which started operation in 1918.
The Claim is Michael Nyman’s first (and, as of 2008, only) score for a Western, and his second collaboration with Michael Winterbottom. In it, in particular, in “The Shootout,” Nyman pays homage to Ennio Morricone’s Western scores. “The Shootout” also incorporates material from A Zed & Two Noughts and Prospero’s Books in a layered manner with elements of the main themes of the score and a Morricone-style trumpet motif.
The score includes the principal scalar riff that appears in numerous Nyman works, including Out of the Ruins, String Quartet No. 3, À la folie, Carrington, the rejected score from Practical Magic, and The End of the Affair. The Claim marks Michael Nyman’s last use of this musical material (as of 2008). Portions of the score appear as solo piano works on Nyman’s 2005 album, The Piano Sings, which features Nyman’s personal piano interpretations of music he had written for various films.
The Claim (2000)
Directed by: Michael Winterbottom
Starring: Peter Mullan, Milla Jovovich, Wes Bentley, Nastassja Kinski, Sarah Polley, Julian Richings, Karolina Muller, Valerie Planche, Sean McGinley
Screenplay by: Frank Cottrell Boyce
Production Design by: Ken Rempel, Mark Tildesley
Cinematography by: Alwin H. Küchler
Film Editing by: Trevor Waite
Costume Design by: Joanne Hansen
Set Decoration by: Paul Healy
Art Direction by: Ken Rempel
Music by: Michael Nyman
MPAA Rating: R for sexuality, and some language and violence.
Distributed by: Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Release Date: December 40, 2000
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