The day before shooting the most intense scene in The Weight, Ethan Hawke pulled his hamstring. “For a variety of dumb reasons,” he admitted to Polygon. He then spent several days alone in the middle of a swaying rope bridge, catching large fake gold bricks and throwing them to the far side while the camera rolled. “When you’re falling all over the ropes over a couple days, it really starts to hurt a lot,” Hawke said. He added that he loved doing it anyway, because he believed in the movie.
The Weight is the feature directorial debut of Padraic McKinley. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2026, and Vertical released it in US theaters on September 18, 2026. The film is set in Oregon in 1933. Hawke plays Samuel Murphy, a struggling single father who is separated from his young daughter and sent to a brutal work camp. The camp’s manipulative warden, Clancy (Russell Crowe), offers him early release in return for a favor: smuggle bags of gold bars out of a mine before Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal officials can seize them, and deliver them to a secret drop-off point.
Murphy sets out with three other inmates and two wary gold miners. Along the way they are joined by an Indigenous runaway played by Julia Jones. The cast also includes Austin Amelio and Avi Nash.
A bridge built for one
The set piece at the center of the film is a rickety bridge that can hold only one man at a time. Murphy stands in the middle while the gold is thrown across bar by bar, and dropping a single one is not an option. McKinley openly compares the scene to the rope-bridge truck crossing in William Friedkin’s Sorcerer: “We took much more of a cue from the Sorcerers of the world.”
The film was shot in Germany, mostly in Bavaria. The crew scouted the region for the right location, and then production designer Cora Pratz built a fully working bridge. It swung for real, and the gaps in it were bigger than a foot. One end was firmly anchored in the ground, while the other was dressed to look natural and dangerous. Because of that, the crew could only shoot in one direction. The fix was simple: film one group throwing the bricks, change the background slightly, then film the other group. “Ethan basically just turned around,” McKinley said. “A little bit of movie magic.”
The Temple of Doom method
The larger problem was making Bavarian forests pass for the wilds of Oregon. McKinley found his model in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which was shot across three countries and locations. The team copied some of that film’s camera angles. The result relies heavily on in-camera work: The Weight has three VFX shots, and the rest is practical.
That approach cost the cast physically. “Pretty much every scene in this movie was stressful and difficult,” Hawke said. Julia Jones described sprained ankles piling up as the shoot moved deeper into the woods, and said the irony was that it helped the performances. Shooting far from cell service had another benefit, according to Hawke: “It’s very easy to transport your mind back in time.”
- Director: Padraic McKinley (feature debut)
- Cast: Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe, Julia Jones, Austin Amelio, Avi Nash
- Distributor: Vertical
- US theatrical release: September 18, 2026
- Runtime: 113 minutes
