SIX GUNS FOR HIRE
A vicious group of strangers gather to divvy up the spoils of a train robbery, while an ace detective pursues hot on their trail. As the bandits realize they may not be strangers after all, the detective unearths a deadly conspiracy at the heart of their crime.
TRAILER
Best known as the indie darling who helped reinvigorate the Western genre in Canadian cinema when his micro-budget Spaghetti Western starring Colm Feore, Six Reasons Why, took the Toronto International Film Festival by storm. Matt immediately booked a series of Entertainment Tonight exclusives and an international bidding war on his film ignited. When the dust settled, Six Reasons Why was on the market in over a dozen countries with distributors like ThinkFilm, eOne Entertainment and Image releasing it around the globe.
His forays into the Science Fiction genre have been met with enthusiasm from industry and audience alike; after the short he helmed, D.N.E.: Do Not Erase won the Best Science Fiction Award at the genre convention Dragon*Con, the SyFy Network greenlit Matt’s Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi script, Mutant World.
Returning to his Sci-Fi Spaghetti Western roots, Matt spent the COVID-19 pandemic completing a SixVerse Trilogy when he directed both “Six Days to Die” and “Six Guns for Hire” with some of the most sought-after on-screen talent in Canada.
As a work-in-progress, this cut of SIX GUNS FOR HIRE has a few remaining VFX shots outstanding, some sound effects are incomplete, and the music has several live instruments yet to be included.
I absolutely LOVE genre film, and the exploration of imaginary worlds in motion pictures. From my childhood love of SciFi to falling in love with Werewolf films in my tweens and then with spaghetti Westerns as a teenager, the place where monsters and the future collide is my jam. I love genre festivals, and my films have played and won at Dragon*Con and WorldFest Houston. It’s the broad-minded reverence that make a genre film festival the perfect fit to premiere SIX DAYS TO DIE, because this is a film steeped in Leone’s revisionist spaghetti westerns and then smashed into Mad Max’s interceptor. It’s a frontier future where we see our own world scrambled into a whole new context for western tropes, cooking up race and religion and sex and gender in a fresh wild west recipe. To me, that’s what genre is for: to alter the lens of reality, to bend our world just enough to check our own prejudice at the theatre door and accept a story into our hearts in a pure way. And maybe we learn something new about ourselves along the journey.
SIX GUNS FOR HIRE exists in a vicious world where the characters are twisted and off-balance, the visual tones are harsh, the environment is barren and austere, and the exact period in time is ambiguously post-apocalyptic. Filmed one or two actors at a time during the COVID-19 pandemic, SIX GUNS FOR HIRE uses green screen and digital matte paintings to bring dozens of actors together inside of a wide open cinematic universe.