'Sicario' With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Sean Fennessey

What It Covers

Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Sean Fennessey analyze Denis Villeneuve's 2015 drug war thriller Sicario in the Rewatchables' first-ever live Netflix podcast. The 125-minute episode covers the film's structure, performances from Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, and Emily Blunt, Roger Deakins' cinematography, Taylor Sheridan's debut screenplay, and the film's enduring relevance to contemporary US-Mexico border politics.

Key Questions Answered

• •Structural misdirection as storytelling tool: Sicario presents Emily Blunt's Kate as the protagonist but reveals her as the audience surrogate — a deliberate structural choice borrowed from Apocalypse Now. The real protagonist is del Toro's Alejandro, whose mission only becomes clear two-thirds through. Stripping 90% of Alejandro's scripted dialogue makes this pivot more effective, forcing viewers to track character through gesture and behavior rather than exposition, rewarding repeat viewings with new layers of meaning.
• •Dialogue reduction as directorial upgrade: Villeneuve's principle — cinema communicates through images and present-tense moments, not dialogue — directly shaped Sicario's production. Del Toro's character originally had substantially more lines in Sheridan's screenplay. The decision to cut them, made collaboratively on set, transformed Alejandro into a more menacing and mysterious figure. The seven lines he retained became the film's most memorable. This approach demonstrates that restraint in performance direction often produces stronger character impact than scripted exposition.
• •Screenplay vs. final film divergence: Sheridan's original Sicario script, widely available online, differs substantially from the finished film. The script opens with Alejandro speaking about Mexico, retains more backstory, and handles the Fausto confrontation differently — sparing the family. Comparing the two documents reveals how directorial choices, particularly cutting backstory and dialogue, elevated the material. The script functions as a case study in how collaborative filmmaking can improve source material when directors have the authority to reshape it.
• •Taylor Sheridan's career trajectory and creative tradeoffs: Sicario represents Sheridan's screenwriting debut as a frustrated actor previously known from Sons of Anarchy. The film launched an eleven-year run including Hell or High Water, Wind River, Yellowstone, and Lioness. The hosts argue his early film work — constrained by producers who could override him — produced tighter, more thematically precise storytelling. His later TV dominance, where he controls everything, results in over-explained themes and diluted impact, suggesting creative friction improves output.
• •Benicio del Toro's career pattern across four decades: Del Toro demonstrates consistent high-level work across four consecutive decades: The Usual Suspects in the 1990s, Traffic in the 2000s (Academy Award winner), Sicario in the 2010s, and Inherent Vice bridging periods. His acting style — minimal dialogue, physical stillness, sustained eye contact — runs counter to the contemporary trend of glib, one-liner-driven performances. His practice of calling filmmakers before production to share character interpretations has materially shaped films including Inherent Vice, where he improvised key sequences with Paul Thomas Anderson.
• •Roger Deakins' cinematography as narrative architecture: Deakins' work on Sicario functions as storytelling rather than decoration. Specific choices — shooting the FBI recruitment scene entirely from behind Kaluuya's head, capturing soldiers dissolving into the last seconds of natural light without CGI, and the thermal imaging tunnel sequence filmed with a single FLIR SC8300 camera available for one day only — communicate character psychology and thematic weight. The arc from brilliant Arizona sunlight to gray monochrome in the final scene mirrors Kate's moral deterioration throughout the film.
• •The border crossing sequence as benchmark action filmmaking: The Juarez traffic jam and return crossing sequence, occurring around the 31-minute mark, functions as the film's visceral peak — comparable structurally to the Flight of the Valkyries sequence in Apocalypse Now. The hosts identify it as among the finest action set pieces of the past 30-40 years, alongside Heat's bank robbery and The Dark Knight's truck chase. Its effectiveness comes from spatial clarity — the audience always knows where each vehicle sits relative to the toll — combined with sustained, unresolved tension.