The cast and director of western remake, “The Magnificent Seven” have been talking about diversity in Hollywood and the epic’s grueling shoot ahead of the film’s release.
The film is led by Denzel Washington’s bounty hunter Sam Chisholm, who brings together alcoholic gambler Josh Farraday (Chris Pratt), sharpshooter Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke) and his knife-throwing comrade Billy Rocks (Byung-Hun Lee).
Director Antoine Fuqua’s film follows the band of outlaws, which also includes Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio), Mexican outlaw Vasquez (Manual Garcia-Rulfo) and Nativa American warrior Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier) as defend a gold mining town from murderous baron Bartholomew Bogue, played by Peter Sarsgaard.
Washington told Reuters that rather than being a reaction to Hollywood’s racial equality issue, the film’s diverse cast is more about being historically accurate. He explained: “We never heard a peep about it, never thought about it when we were shooting and now, I guess, it’s a topic for people to talk about. I mean it’s actually reflective of… a more honest reflection of what was going on at the time.”
“The Magnificent Seven” is a remake of the 1960 Western directed by John Sturges, which in turn is an Old West-style version of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 Japanese-language film ‘Seven Samurai’.
The remake took five months to shoot, something that Ethan Hawke found to be particularly hard going. He told Reuters: “It was raining and we were wearing all these clothes and we’re in the middle of nowhere, you know there’s no service. There’s nowhere to hide and we were all on set because if we’re not in the scene then we’re in the background of the scene so were all around all the time.. and it was five months. A lot of movies these days, you shoot for four weeks and you’re done but this wasn’t like that.”
“Byung-Hun and I spent five weeks up in that church steeple, every day, it was blazing hot, sitting up there shooting bad guys day after day.”
The film is the latest in a string of major movies for actor Chris Pratt, who has gone from TV co-star to Hollywood A-lister in just a few years. When asked about how he is handling fame, he mused: “Just in a general sense, pretty much all life can be challenging, this just has a slightly different set of challenges than before. I feel grateful and I think that if you can be happy when you don’t have anything then you can be happy when you have everything, but if you can’t be happy when you have nothing, even having everything you are not going to be happy.”
”The Magnificent Seven” hits theaters on September 23, 2016.
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2016
