Though born in Henley-on-Thames, Hugo Blick could have been a cowboy. Aged 18, his concerned parents decided he needed to have his waywardness ironed out of him. He was packed off to Montana and put under the tutelage of a family friend who happened to be an avid outdoorsman and former US air force captain.
“I was thought to need a stabilising influence,” recalls the 57-year-old writer, director and actor over video call from New York. The air force captain taught Blick how to shoot and hunt. “Apologies to any vegans out there,” he says. He also learned how to spin a horse. Even in the late 80s, Montana was a wilder west than anything on the M4 corridor. “Winters where temperatures go below -60F are not unusual and life out there can be hard. The ghosts of the harshness of the frontier of the 1890s still haunted the place, at least for me.”
