After two minutes of conversation with writer and director Jeymes Samuel, his Netflix western The harder they fall suddenly makes a lot more sense. Samuel, a British singer-songwriter and producer (under the name The Bullitts), speaks vigorously with his hands and body and regularly breaks into tiny song snippets when what he’s saying matches the lyrics of a favorite song. He plays air guitar to accompany himself while watching the melody of a movie theme, and his face glows with vibrating energy when he talks about his work.
Suddenly the great energy is in The harder they fall has a clear face. It’s a crowded movie with actors who have earned rave fandoms – Idris Elba, Jonathan Majors, Regina King, Zazie Beetz, LaKeith Stanfield, Delroy Lindo, and more. It’s similarly overflowing with ideas and subplots, not all of which are in focus. It wriggles between humor and sincerity, between flashy style and dark emotions. His music is particularly versatile and jumps from Jay-Z and CeeLo Green to Seal (Samuel’s brother, by the way) and Kid Cudi, from loping reggae to dreamy soul to tough hip-hop. And it all seems to fit in perfectly with Samuel’s eagerness and energy in the conversation.
It was particularly important for Samuel to find the right music for the film. “I watch music and I listen to film, so to speak,” he tells Polygon. “In my brain, they somehow exist as the same thing. I wanted to give this film its own handwriting, just as Ennio Morricone gave Sergio Leone his own handwriting. He took an electric guitar, which was a fairly new instrument in the 1960s, and gave it to you [vocalizes the theme from Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Samuel laughs as he goes through these iconic Western melodies, strikes the notes with “Ding de Ding” noises and the “ha! Ha! “Exhalations from Morricone’s production.” That was the orchestral West, “he says with a grin.”The big country! The seekers! True grit! I looked around and explored all of these sounds, sat with my guitar and the footage for age. And then I realized the secret was in dub, in old school reggae. It’s super cowboy! It’s super western! “
Perhaps no one is currently associating reggae with cowboys and the American West, but Samuel points out that until the heyday of spaghetti westerns and Hollywood westerns in the 1950s, there was no reason to associate orchestras with this era – originally cowboy music! ” he says. “None it was real old west music! So we got the idea because that was the music of the day in Hollywood. So I took the old school reggae we heard as kids and used it as the basis for the score to give the movie its own Afrocentric Western voice. This choice was really important. “
The art that Samuel experienced in his childhood was heavily influenced The harder they fall also in other ways, including wanting to do a western in the first place. He says when he was growing up westerns were “constant on television, ”and he associates it with the warmth of snuggling up to his parents and watching films together. He is more related to the western than other favorite genres, he says.
“I love all of cinema, I love all genres of film,” he says. “It’s just like westerns” real me. You know, Star Wars and science fiction are every kid’s dream, but you are knows You don’t have friends who look like Chewbacca. I can identify with a horse. I didn’t have an android that could screech like C-3PO, but I could identify with a gunslinger. “
He doesn’t mean that too literally, he says – “It’s not that the people around me were wearing cowboy hats and spurs.” But the settings and situations in westerns seemed more visceral than the things he did in fantasy-oriented films saw. “The people in the western seem simple real
To like You fall harder, Samuel’s first filmed project, They die at dawn, is also a starry black western made from real black figures in the American West. The 51-minute short film with the main role The cableMichael K. Williams’ alongside Bokeem Woodbine, Erykah Badu, Isaiah Washington and Rosario Dawson appeared in connection with his Bullitts album You Die at Dawn and other short stories. Both projects came out of Samuel’s need to reshape a genre he loved to recognize truths about the Old West that Hollywood films had ignored.
“There were definitely things that I needed to update,” says Samuel. “The margin they allowed us to see through to tell the stories was just too tight. All women were submissive. Even if you like a western Johnny guitar, with Joan Crawford, the dumbest actor ever – one of the most powerful actors we’ve ever seen on screen, her and Bette Davis – they’ll still be the love interest, depending on one plot or another.
And classic westerns similarly ignored that a Quarter of the real cowboys were black, and that the West was as attractive to people of color as a place of freedom and reinvention as it was to the whites who dominate Hollywood westerns. “The People of Color in Westerns have always been very stereotypical and almost inhuman,” says Samuel. “An Asian person will always do the laundry, Mexicans will wear white and walk around like Speedy Gonzales, who was a caricature of how Hollywood saw Mexicans in the Old West. And black people were always slaves or something. So I really had to update this narrative. “
He says his whole motive for making The harder they fall should show that independent women and non-white people were prevalent in the west. “And they were absolute gangsters!” he cheers. “The real Cherokee Bill, the character played by LaKeith Stanfield, when he went to his execution, they said ‘Any last words?’ He said, ‘I came here to the‘Don’t make a speech.’ These people were Gs! [Hoots] And we’ve never seen them on the screen! “
Apart from escaping Classic western whitewashHowever, Samuel wanted to keep the familiar tropes, which he found exciting in the genre. “There are certain tropes that you have hold tight, ”he says. “Bank robberies! Railway raids! Jailbreaks! The quick pull! I wanted to show all of this but make a really serious, soulful story. And in the words of Greg Nice: [Sings] ‘This is how you bring the old to the new. ‘”
Samuel says many of the characters in The harder they fall were written with specific actors in mind, and that he was generally “lucky” to get the specific people he wanted. But even though he had visualized them on screen, “even if it was just for inspiration, to channel a role,” they kept surprising him during the filming.
“That’s the craziest thing. It was almost like magic on set, every day, ”he says. “Anyone surprised me because anyone did things I didn’t see. Little did I know Jonathan could ride majors for leather. This guy does a full gallop with no hands and shoots at his enemies, bam, bam, bam, bam! We had to keep up with him with the camera. I didn’t even know he could ride a horse when I threw him [as real-life cowboy Nat Love]. I asked Jonathan, ‘When did you learn to ride? He said, ‘I can’t ride a horse … but Nat Love can.’
“And RJ Cyler surprised everyone with the guns and his shooting game. Regina King has a scene in which [her character] Trudy Smith speaks with [Zazie Beetz’ character] Stagecoach Mary and Trudy peel this apple with a knife. In this monologue, Regina peeled it off without breaking the skin, but made a bowl that rolled up to the floor. I said ‘where did you learn that?’ She just looks at me like [gruff Regina King impression] ‘This is what I do to do. ‘ Everyone was great. It was like everyone knew this was a magical thing that we were doing and everyone just came up with magic. “