[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Dark Winds Season 3, Episode 8, “Béésh Lii (Iron Horse).”]
Dark Winds delivered its biggest finale yet with Season 3’s epic train sequence captured by executive producer and director Chris Eyre for the screen.
As viewers who tuned in will recall, Joe Leaphorn’s (Zahn McClarnon) investigation into the death of Ernesto Cata (Alonso Rappa) and the attack on George Bowlegs (Bodhi Okuma Linton) led him to archaeologist Dr. Reynolds (Christopher Heyerdahl). The scientist had been seeding his dig site, and when Ernesto caught on, the man went after him, leaving George’s fate in the balance as Reynolds sought to silence him, too.
Reynolds’ search for the other boy led him to a train, where he was unaware that a trap by Leaphorn, Chee (Kiowa Gordon), and their fellow Navajo police was being set. Things got dicey when Leaphorn and crew lost sight of an unaware George and also lost their tail on Reynolds, leading Leaphorn and Chee to jump onboard.
Michael Moriatis / AMC
What ensues is a tense game of cat and mouse as Leaphorn’s search for the unstable Reynolds leads to a shootout while the train speeds along the New Mexico landscape. In the end, Leaphorn’s confrontation with Reynolds pushes the men to the back of the train as the doctor holds George. Eventually, Reynolds lets the boy go, and before he’s able to shoot himself with the gun he’s brought to this fight, or turn it on Leaphorn, Chee emerges from the second-to-last traincar to shoot the threat.
“I’d heard that we might be shooting the finale on the train, and I said, ‘Oh my god, that would be incredible,’” Eyre gushes about taking on the epic scene. “Then it dawned on me, I’ve been on that train because, lo and behold, it’s a train that George R. R. Martin, our producing partner, owns here in Santa Fe.”
For those who may recall, Martin and fellow executive producer Robert Redford made Season 3 premiere cameos as prisoners at the Navajo police station. According to Eyre, the train’s inclusion was determined when Martin gave the okay to write it into the script. “How many people can say, ‘Hey, I have a friend who owns a train and a rail line’? And so, there were conversations with George about [whether] we could shoot the train for the finale. So they wrote a script with the train, and I was over the moon,” Eyre shares.
Michael Moriatis / AMC
As the director puts it, “It’s one of those things that you hope to do as a filmmaker is do a train sequence and have that kind of landscape. It has all sorts of broad strokes towards the Western, which I love.” And Eyre can’t help but acknowledge the bigger role Martin and Redford played onscreen this season beyond their behind-the-scenes roles as executive producers. “We really were able to get George and Bob involved in a deeper way [in Season 3 ],” Eyre states.
Meanwhile, when it came to challenging aspects of shooting the train sequences, Eyre says with a laugh, “I think the most challenging — and this is kind of funny — is resetting the train, which as a filmmaker you [usually] reset the background and everybody goes back and you do another take. I’d never had the experience of doing a take and then stopping to reset the train because that can take 15 to 20 minutes.”
The hardest part, Eyre says, was keeping track of where everyone is at any given moment as the scene unfolds. “Knowing which cars they came from and how they all got to the end [of the train]… tracking where each character was on the moving train was the part that I needed to use my [assistant directors for].”
Ultimately, Eyre reveals they probably reset the scene about 10 times, “and it takes quite a while.” But beyond working with the cast on this complex sequence, Eyre says, “It was great to do drone shots with the train because it really does have such a presence.” Adding to the authenticity, Eyre points out, “George [R.R. Martin]’s train has authentic period cars that several presidents from the 1900s rode in, including [Franklin D.] Roosevelt.”
And according to Eyre, the train was also used by Christopher Nolan for 2023’s hit film Oppenheimer. “It is just such a distinguished set piece as a director to have a train cutting through the Southwest, and you’re watching your drone fly across the bow of the train… just the scope of it, I was in love,” Eyre marvels.
Stay tuned for what else Eyre and team have cooked up for Season 4 when it arrives on AMC and AMC+, and until then let us know what you thought of that epic train scene in the comments section below.
Dark Winds, Season 4 Premiere, TBA, AMC & AMC+
This story originally appeared on TV Insider
