Australian director Andrew Dominik has three feature films to his credit: Chopper (2000), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Killing Them Softly (2012). Having relocated to Hollywood since the underground success of Chopper, he has continued as a writer/director auteur whose cinema essays America as a mythical and suspicious fiction of paranoia and doubt, crime plots and assassins. In the context of American audiences, however, Dominik's scornful meditations about America's hypocrisy has caused great trepidation for film funders and distribution companies, for he remains an unsafe bet; and although he likes the reputation of being the hubris outsider, with disastrous box-office openings for his previous two films, this article looks to investigate the circumstances and decisions that has him at a precarious moment of his career.
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