STACK #143 Sept 2016

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CINEMA INTERVIEW

Assembling

In 1960, director John Sturges gathered the leading men of the day for the classic western The Magnificent Seven . Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Yul Brynner, Robert Vaughn and James Coburn delighted audiences as a group of gunslingers hired to defend an oppressed Mexican peasant village. Now Antoine Fuqua has assembled a star- powered septet to retell the same story, recruiting the likes of Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke to deal with the outlaws who have brought a sleepy western town to its knees.

some people will think that's because it’s a black man walking into a bar. But my thought was that they look at all the Seven like that because they’re all mean, tough men. And when those guys walk in a room it's not about race, it's that they’re afraid of these type of men, whether its a Native American walking in or Denzel walking in, or Chris Pratt walking in. They get the same reaction. From everybody.” Shot in Louisiana and New Mexico, The Magnificent Seven was fraught with such difficulties that Fuqua doubts he would make another Western, having thoroughly got it out of his system now. “That old saying, ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ comes to mind,” he smiles. “As a kid you’re like, ‘I want to make a Western,’ and you’ve got the guns and you’re playing and it’s fun and you can go home and eat and mom is there and your friends. You can quit whenever you want and get mad at your friend and walk away because you wanted to be the indian today. “But the reality of filming is that horses do what they want. I’ve had that experience before, but this was a reminder. Having a big cast of actors is challenging, every day. Filming it in a place where it rains constantly, where your set washes away, is challenging. Most of the time it was over 110 degrees.”  And his worst nightmare? “That’s got to be a scene where we had hundreds of horses

Words: Gill Pringle

I n keeping with Hollywood’s mandate to bring more diversity to the screen, Antoine Fuqua’s motley crew features actors of all colour, including Denzel Washington, Byung-hun Lee and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. If it smacks of a self-conscious colour-by-numbers approach, then the director begs to differ. “I thought about it and I didn’t think about it,” he says when STACK meets with him at an editing suite in Los Angeles. “When we were discussing who the lead would be, we had a list of the usual guys and I was in a room with MGM and I said, ‘You know who would be amazing as a lead like Yul Brynner? Denzel Washington.’ And the room went quiet and then everybody says, ‘You think he would do it because he hasn’t done a Western before?’” recalls the director, who got on the next flight to New York to talk with his Training Day and Equalizer leading man.

The race card will play out regardless, although Fuqua insists his own Magnificent Seven are such mean killing machines, it will render audiences colour blind. “You’ll see a scene where we first meet them in the bar – when Denzel goes into the bar and the whole room goes quiet – and naturally

To me, the movie is about terrorism, and it's going to take us all to fight terrorism. That group represents the world today

storming down a hill and explosions going off. Now that was daunting.”  While Fuqua and Washington are old friends, the director was thrilled to introduce Pratt to audiences in a different way to how we’ve seen him before. “I love Chris. Chris is charming, he’s funny, but he has an interesting depth in him that’s yet to be discovered and I wanted to put him with Vincent D’Onofrio and Ethan Hawke. I wanted to see the young star with all these guys and play with that soup.”

“Denzel knows I love Westerns and so we had lunch and talked about it. And then from that point it just opened up the floodgates to be more diverse. I didn’t think about it as colour. I just thought I needed a powerful lead and colour was a conversation that came after.   “It’s a different world we live in and, to me, the movie is about terrorism and it’s going to take us all to fight terrorism, so that’s what this is. That group represents the world today.”

SEPTEMBER 2016

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