[IMG:L]As far as tough sells go, director James Mangold said film pitches didn’t come any tougher than trying to convince Hollywood to remake 3:10 to Yuma, an admired but long-forgotten Western from the 1950s.
“We have a genre that no studio believes anyone wants to see anymore, we have a story no one’s ever heard of before,” the filmmaker said. “No one knew who starred in the original, so in a way we really had our work cut out for us.”
But Mangold had already proved that with enough dedication, dream projects can be realized. In addition to his desire to craft a modern take on the cult classic Western the filmmaker had also long harbored a passion to tell the life story of country singer Johnny Cash, a project that came to fruition in 2005 as the widely hailed biopic Walk the Line. And when that film earned five Academy Award nominations and landed an Oscar in the arms of leading lady Reese Witherspoon, and the studios were soon looking at Mangold’s offbeat pitch in a slightly more favorable light – but it still wasn’t a slam dunk sale.
But then Oscar-winning actor Russell Crowe saw something he liked in the character of Ben Wade, the extremely charming but equally lethal bandit who finds himself captured by a thin posse taking him to a federal prison in Yuma, Ariz. And the big screen’s Batman, Christian Bale, gravitated toward the character of Dan Evans, the down-and-out Civil War veteran who escorts Wade to Yuma in a desperate attempt to save his faltering ranch and win back the respect of his family.
And finally Hollywood was sold.
“I had spent quite a bit of time with James Mangold about six years ago,” said Crowe. “We sort of became conversational friends, and so when he sent me the script I read it and I enjoyed the dynamic between the two characters, and that was basically the decision made.”
“I think it’s the appeal of all Westerns, just being a time of the most anarchy compared to nowadays when a man really does have to be self-sufficient,” said Bale. “I think nowadays we can get away a lot with being very vague about having opinions about things, beliefs in something…At that time, you had to be a much stronger-minded individual in order to survive, and I find that appealing: to watch people who really have to test their mettle every day.”
“Russell was someone who I very much had in mind when I would talk with Cathy [Conrad. Mangold’s wife and producing partner] about this movie for several years,” said Mangold. “[I was] really interested in approaching him with this. And it was our first pass. He at one point was tied to Baz [Luhrmann]‘s movie, which made it seem like it wasn’t going to happen, and then suddenly he became available and that was really a motherload for us, because I think he’s perfect Ben Wade.
“In the casting of Christian, that was something I really opened my eyes to,” the director explained. “He was someone who I sat down and met, and I was not sure. I really admired his work, but wanted to make sure that I felt it in him – and I really did. I really felt an incredible passion for him, from him for the role and also was just really impressed with what he was going to bring to Dan Evans.”
“When we found out it was Russell and Christian, it was like Christmas,” said co-screenwriter Derek Haas, who had crafted a script with writing partner Michael Brandt, adapting the original 1957 screenplay by Halsted Welles (who receives story credit on the original) which in turn was inspired by a short story by then up-and-coming author Elmore Leonard. “If excitement is a 10, we were a 20. When you write something, you just have no idea how it’s going to be cast and it can go any way.”
Co-screenwriter Brandt agreed the news was thrilling, especially after a long and often disappointing development process. “We went through a weird rollercoaster where Tom Cruise was on board for awhile and then that didn’t work out,” he revealed. “Then it got put in turnaround and all of a sudden we get a phone call saying ‘Russell and Christian and Lionsgate’ – It just all happened like that. It was fantastic. It was a movie that should have always been made, and we always felt like it was going to be made as long as Jim stayed with it.”
[IMG:R]Telling an Old Tale in a New Way
Mangold stayed with it, arguing out the logic of bypassing a remake of an old TV show or high-concept B-movie and instead revisiting intriguing film stories from the past “when movies aren’t legendary or haven’t become iconographic” by comparing the idea of adapting the well-crafted ‘50s Western he first saw at age 17 to the countless re-interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays over the centuries since their first performances in the Elizabethan era.
“How many Hamlets have been made? How many Macbeths have been made?” Mangold wondered. “We have in this country also really wonderful, mythic, timeless texts, and there are times where it might be interesting to bring a contemporary point of view to one of these stories instead of half the time what Hollywood does is remake the movie from the side – which is keep all the story elements but deny that you’re just doing a mirror of the original film. Why not just be honest about it and do that text again? And that’s exactly what we kind of just thought we’d do.”
The writers were intrigued by the parallel qualities the actors shared with the stars of the original 3:10 to Yuma, with Crowe in Glenn Ford‘s rougish role and Bale as Van Heflin‘s stolid rancher. “What Glenn Ford did in that movie that Russell does so well, too, is that they have this amazing ability to, if you’re sitting in the room with them you’ll be charmed your pants off, but at the same time that guy can shoot you in the stomach,” he said. “In our minds we were writing for that. Glenn Ford used such a good guy through all of these movies and then he just turned on a dime, but he kept that good guy vibe even though he was punching Van Heflin in the face.”
And while Bale is considerably younger than Heflin was in the original, the similarity in age between the new film’s two leading men was an important factor in the updated story, said Haas. “It’s got to be that duality – Russell Crowe’s life could have been this and Christian Bale’s life could have been that.”
[IMG:L]The Western As ‘Taxi Driver’ on Horseback
“Traditional Westerns are really mis-typed as bad guy, good guy movies,” Mangold said. “Most of them, if you go back – who’s the bad guy and good guy in Shane? Shane’s a killer, but he saves the family. Jack Palance wants some property – Is he bad, is he good? Everything is gray. The Searchers – Is John Wayne a good guy or a bad guy? I think that’s one of the great misconceptions about the Westerns and why they’re dead. [What] isn’t really true, except for the worst Gene Autry movies, is that there really was never the black hat, white hat Western.
“John Wayne was a dark figure,” the director continued. “3:10 to Yuma in 1957 – that’s not a movie about clear cut good guys and bad guys. Rio Grande, Rio Lobo – I could go on and on. These are all movies about the gray between good and bad, and I think part of the reason people have tuned out of the Western is this assumption that it actually isn’t born out by reality, that they’re somehow simplistic stories. When in fact I think they sometimes have more in common with [films] like Taxi Driver.”
Mangold reveled in the ability to use the genre to reflect many of the issues that are relevant to a contemporary American audience, without obvious, spot-on scenarios and metaphors. “I think that one of the things the Western gave us an opportunity to do – and I don’t think it’s particularly obtuse – is explore a lot of issues today in the context of the post-Civil War period in America and allow you to see them allegorically, instead of directly. And it makes the film less preachy. It makes the film less of a kind of political didactic experience and much more of a film where you experience ‘Wow, I didn’t know that voluntary militia men were drawn into the Civil War, even if they didn’t want to be.’”
“Ben Wade will justify violence using a kind of anarchy, an almost libertarian philosophy of survival of the fittest,” said the director. “At the other side of the spectrum you have Peter Fonda, who’s kind of using violence justified by law and order. And both of them are quoting the bible to justify their actions. And I think that a lot of that becomes a way to play out things without making political points but actually drawing an audience into something where they just might be left thinking, in a way that we haven’t divided people.”
“I think journeys are tremendously important in Westerns,” said Fonda, a veteran of several films in the genre (and whose father Henry was one of the most iconic Western actors) who plays “This journey gave us a chance to develop character, to discuss each other and to learn and for the audience to get into each other’s character, for both [Crowe’s] character and my character…This is a way for Ben Wade to play off the same side of a different coin. We’re both stone cold killers, but Ben’s at the moment in his life thinking ‘What am I doing? This is a journey I might not want to be on.’ My character is ‘I’m on this journey for the whole long run. I’m going to get this S.O.B. to Yuma and on into hell.’”
[IMG:R]Shoot Outs on Screen
In Westerns or otherwise, Crowe says that the challenge for an actor is simply finding a role as interesting as Ben Wade. “It’s always been that way,” explained the actor, “especially in my life in the movies. You get a lot of opportunities that come with a big paycheck and all that sort of stuff but don’t necessarily appeal to you…I think you’ve got to stay true to yourself in that way. I read a script, if I get goose bumps, if I kind of like what the potential of it is, then that’s the thing that I do.”
The leading men quickly carved out their working relationship. “Whenever people ask me what I was doing next and I said that I was going to be working with Russell they would kind of look at me and go, ‘Oh, right, you’re going to be in for a tough ride with him!’ Bale revealed. “It was absolutely true.” He was joking, of course – the actor explained that he and Crowe have a similar discipline when it comes to their performances.
“I don’t mean to talk out of school, but a lot of actors sort of complain and do everything to avoid actually getting on with the work,” Bale said, “so it’s nice when you’re working with someone like Russell when you can just get to the point and you can have blunt conversations about the scenes. It just makes it easy. Obviously, he doesn’t have to be told what to do because he’s a bloody good actor and it’s a pleasure to work with someone as good as that.”
The shared work ethic resulted in a uniquely combustible chemistry on screen, but the actors didn’t spend too much time analyzing how they found it. “We didn’t do a whole lot of talking about it off screen,” said Bale. “I tend to feel like if it’s working, it’s working, you know? And it was working. We didn’t have to sort of sit and dissect the whole thing. It was pretty evident – It was right there. We’re both coming into it with very strong and firm ideas about who we are and the characters and everything, and I think it’s all up there. It’s self-evident.”
The film’s supporting actors also got to dig deep into their characters and find extra dimensions. Ben Foster, who delivers a striking performance as Wade’s flashy, bloodthirsty lieutenant Charlie Prince, recalled “going over a lot of photos of outlaws with Jim and Arianne [Phillips], our brilliant costume designer, we came to the conclusion that outlaws were rock stars of their day, very flamboyant dressers…so if we’re going in a rock and roll angle and tipping the hat to the Civil War, there is an actual white leather coat very similar to that one in a museum that we found and that felt kind of ‘glam rock’ to me. So we kind of went down that direction – it was just watching a lot of [David] Bowie and how he would move.”
[IMG:L]Horsing Around
Though there were some complaints among the cast about the frequent below-zero temperatures while shooting in Santa Fe, New Mexico during winter (although Fonda said the weather didn’t faze Bale: “Christian, being from London, had ice in his veins and did not know it was cold… You can be British and be a Western”), the actors were eager to embrace the sheer fun of the genre and enjoy playing cowboy.
“I’m an absolute horse lover,” said Crowe, who owns a working ranch in his native Australia, and bonded quickly with his steeds. “There are some horses that you sort of have a deep connection with immediately and you can work on that over time. The gentler you are and the more constant you are with the horse the deeper that connection gets…You get really close to them. The working relationship is quite intense working 10 or 12 hours a day for a number of months, and so it gets hard to say goodbye.”
“The cowboy thing? Not a problem for me,” laughed Fonda, but he expressed a little less fondness for his equine co-stars. “I can control a horse [but] I ride motorcycles for a reason. They don’t bite when you’ve not been on them for six months. They don’t decide to go green and buck you off. But I have a certain respect for horses. It’s very difficult when we’re doing our work on horseback because it’s very hard to make a horse hit marks so you have to be able to hit the mark and if the horse is moving just make that part of that entity.”
Bale said he took quickly to the classic Old West landscape, even though he was frequently covered in dirt, dust and grime throughout the film. “The canyons and being out in the high desert, that was nice. Just being out riding your horses and shooting your guns, that’s a lot of fun,” said the actor. “I kind of like movies where I get to just be dirty and crawling in the mud. With Rescue Dawn it was all that primordial stuff, and with this one it was all about wearing the same clothes day after day and getting sweaty and dirty, exposure to the sun. It’s meant to be like that. Westerns are meant to be dirty. They shouldn’t be all nice and clean. I like getting my hands dirty.”
