You can take the horse to the cinema, but you cannot make them enjoy the movie. "Best Picture" Oscar nominee The Power of the Dog is considered one of the frontrunners for this year's Evergreen Awards. However, not all cowboys are in favor of Jane Campion's adaptation of the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage. On the WTF podcast hosted by Marc Maron, 1883's Sam Elliott shared that he didn't like director Jane Campion's Western approach. Elliott criticized the reconstruction of the Cowboy archetype and Western style, comparing Benedict Cumberbatch's character Phil to the Chippendale dancers. "Looks like all these fucking cowboys in that movie," he told Maron. "They're running around without shirts and shirts on. These are all signs of homosexuality throughout the movie." Maron responded by criticizing Elliot as "what the film is about". Cumberbatch plays a close-knit gay man who is more than hypermasculinity. "Where's the Westerner in this Western?" Elliot continued. "I mean, Cumberbatch never got out of his fucking people. He had two pairs of slippers—a wool pair and a leather pair. And every fucking time he walked by somewhere—he was never on a horse, Maybe once - he'd walk into the fucking house, climb the fucking stairs, lay in his bed on his bed and play his banjo. It's like, what the fuck?"
Costuming wasn't Elliot's only issue in the film; The film was originally set in 1920s Montana, while the production of the film was filmed in New Zealand. "What does this woman know about the American West from the bottom up?" Campion's Elliot criticized, "Why did he shoot this movie in New Zealand and call it Montana? And say it was like that? That fucking dragged me the wrong way." Campion told the Los Angeles Times in 2021 that the decision to film in New Zealand was made due to budget constraints. "A lot of great old farm houses were renovated as resorts. Or turned into other homes that were half authentic, half luxurious kitchens. We looked and looked, but we couldn't find anything, and ranch houses and There the cost of building a fake city turned out to be incredibly expensive items, ”said the director of Power of the Dog. Despite his feelings on the modern Western, Elliott concluded by admitting that he took his criticisms of the film personally.