The Western mythos runs deep in James Mangold's work, going all the way back to Copland, his gritty urban drama from 1997 about a gang of outlaws who live out on a lawless patch of land called North Jersey, well out of the reach of the civilizing influence of Manhattan. By the third act of that film, what began as a police procedural has evolved into a re-telling of High Noon, complete with a bloody, one-man-against-many showdown. Then there's the honky-tonk world of Walk the Line, where men are expected to be men and keeping it all bottled up is a foregone conclusion. After Mangold directed Joaquin Phoenix to an Oscar nom in the role of Johnny Cash and Reese Witherspoon to a win for her role as June Carter Cash -- Mangold himself was strangely snubbed -- everyone wondered what he'd tackle next.
The answer is 3:10 to Yuma, a remake of the 1957 Western classic starring the great Van Heflin as a poor rancher who jumps at the chance to make some easy money by escorting a recently captured bandit, played by Glenn Ford, to the train station, where he'll be transported to prison. Russell Crowe steps into Ford's big shoes in the remake, with perpetual sourpuss Christian Bale playing the rancher who quickly discovers that escorting Ben Wade isn't such easy money after all -- Wade's gang is in hot pursuit, to set their man free. I recently spoke to Mangold from L.A.
Ryan Stewart: I saw the movie last night.
James Mangold: Wow, that's recently.
RS: Yeah. Those gunshots are still ringing in my ears. How'd you get them so loud?
JM: Well, it's all about the volume they play it at -- where did you see it? I wanna know what theater you were in.
RS: Dolby Screening Room, at 6th and 55th street.
JM: Well that's why -- you were in a fucking Dolby Screening Room. No wonder it sounded so good. Their fucking whole world is built on their speakers. But good, I'm glad. We did work a long time. Our sound effects guys actually went and fired guns off in the mountains of Colorado just to get the kind of reports you get back from the mountainside, the echos as they ring out. I mean, a lot of work went into that. Our mixer, you know, it was the same mixing team that was on Walk the Line -- brilliant guys. A lot of attention went into that stuff.
RS: Right. Speaking of gunshots, I've spoken to directors before who've had to stage gunfights, and they say it's maddening, like getting all the reaction shots in a dinner party scene. Were you pulling your hair out, filming gunfights with multiple participants?
JM: It was crazy. It was crazy. But you know, it's a family, the film -- it's a crew I've worked with on several movies before. My operator has been with me since Girl, Interrupted. So in many ways, we just kind of did the dance. You just go with it. And we shot fast. We shot the movie very fast. But yeah, it's a lot of set-ups. It's a lot to cover. The sooner you just kind of stop complaining and just do it ... you know you need to do it, so do it. Just shoot it.
RS: Let's talk about Russell Crowe's character. He's obviously a violent psychopath and all that, but you went out of your way to also show him having artistic abilities, and being contemplative and tender with Vinessa Shaw's character -- do you see him as being an educated man?
JM: I don't view him as an educated man, in the sense that I don't think Russell or I would think that his character actually went to school, but he is a smart guy and he has read books. And he clearly represents a learned and wise position, in relation to the world. I think that's really cool. I think part of what always interested me about this material -- and always interests me in general -- is having a quote-unquote villain who, once you get to know them, you like them. I think it's much more interesting than some dastardly, twirling his mustache while he plays with a thermo-nuclear device. It's like, I'd much rather have a guy whose motives are curious.
RS: Wade is a villain, but he's also a winner.
JM: Yeah. And you could argue, architecturally speaking, that he's actually the protagonist of the movie.
RS: Interesting.
JM: Because from the moment we introduce him, he's kind of a dissatisfied villain. In the sense that he isn't very happy doing what he's doing. You get a sense, even from the moment that Ben Foster arrives for the first time to tell him about the coach that's coming up the road, that he's bored out of his mind, Russell's character, with the idea of ... another coach. And I think that made for very interesting characters -- this guy who is almost over it. And that plays into the ending a little bit. I think he spends a lot of the movie looking for ways to actually get caught or to run away.
RS: The guys in Copland were sort of bored too, I remember. They were just subsistence-level criminals. You know, there's that moment when Sylvester Stallone's character says, "Their pools are all above ground." They're just grinding it out, making a living, and they get bored like everyone else.
JM: Yeah, I agree with that. For me, humanizing things on all sides is the most interesting thing in a movie. Humanize things, humanize the scale. I think it's really lame when people say the reason that ... I used to even chafe at the words "good guys" and "bad guys." I think it's so fuckin' lame. Even in the old movies, in Shane, who is the good guy? Shane, the killer, who comes and protects the family but has killed many innocent people in the past? I mean, the fact is that morality, when it's less easy, is more interesting and more like our lives. That, to me, has always been the hallmark of the Western. A lot of people refer to the Western with things like "black hat" and "white hat" and good guys and bad guys and they actually never were. The only Western that were ever like that were the really shitty Gene Autry Westerns. And the TV shows, like "Gunsmoke" or "Bonanza." But the movie Westerns, from the Peckinpah films to the Spaghetti Westerns, to the Clint Eastwood films and backing up to Ford and Stevens and Delmer Daves -- none of these guys' movies were about white hats and black hats, like The Lone Ranger. They were about men in gray areas. Revenge, anger, hatred, and conflict that was coming from the darkness in men's hearts.
RS: Well, in a lot of Clint Eastwood's movies, he was unquestionably the good guy. I'm thinking of the Man With No Name movies. Even if he was playing a gun for hire, you saw Clint Eastwood and immediately thought, "This is the guy I can get behind, this is the guy who I can trust."
JM: Right, but let me proposition you. [spoiler alert] At the end of this picture, wherever Russell Crowe is heading off to, I could start a Man With No Name movie with that character. Meaning that, you've been calling him a bad guy in our movie, but I could start a movie with the character from where he ends in our picture, and you could literally make a Man With No Name movie. Usually, Clint Eastwood played a man with a horrific past. You're just starting where, all the horrific shit he did is before the fade-in. I mean, Unforgiven -- he was a murderer! But we open and he's a farmer whose lost his wife. But he killed a lot of people in his day, for no good reason. I think that's what I'm talking about. There's a kind of darkness to the morality, and there isn't this fear, as there would be in a modern context, of constructing heroes who haven't sinned in the past.
RS: So what are the bottom lines for Ben Wade? He takes the easy path because there's no authority higher than the Pinkertons? There's nothing to believe in? Or is he a guy, in the more modern sense, who just has a screw loose and kills because something inside tells him to?
JM: No, I see him as a wounded person, with some damage and some anger. He was abandoned by his mother in a train station, with a bible. I think he has ... I mean, Russell plays this out really beautifully, and Russell could speak to it quite beautifully and eloquently. He has this idea of an un-benevolent God. He believes that the universe is not just. That, like the Apache believed, that God is not a just soul, he does what he wants, not necessarily what is right. And that our lives here on Earth are not necessarily the result of, like, being good. It's an interesting worldview, that Crowe's character kind of lives by. And if you notice, he never hurts a good person in the context of the entire movie. The only people he kills are pretty much scumbags.
RS: But he says to the kid at one point, "If I'd had a gun, you'd be dead."
JM: Yeah, but do you believe him?
RS: I don't know. Let me put it this way --
JM: How many times did he have a weapon and he could have ... when he had that fork and he took out the guy at the campfire, couldn't he have killed a couple more people? I mean, there's a level where I see -- I'm not telling you how to see it -- I see Ben Wade as a kind of a big cat who's so fuckin' bored with his life, toying with this ball of yarn, half-hoping he gets caught up in it, just so that he has the excitement of trying to get out of it. There's a level where he's so fuckin' bored when you meet him on that hillside. He doesn't give a shit about that coach. Another coach. Another fuckin' bag of money. Whatever. There's a level where, when he gets alone with Vinessa Shaw in Bisbee, the first thing he's saying to her is, "Jump out that back window with me." Why can't he go out the front window? Because he wants to escape his gang, too. He wants to get away from it all. He wants to get away from it all. He's got enough money. Have you ever had, like, dogs that you get sick of feeding them? You're like, "I wish I could just go away for three days and not have to fuckin' put down these bowls and walk them"? I think Russell is sick of owning this gang and having to keep them in line. They're a bunch of animals. It's like he has twelve Rottweilers. And it's like, "What is he gonna fuckin' do with them?"
RS: He gets a twinkle in his eye when there's a new challenge, and one of those times is when he's briefly alone with Gretchen Mol's character [the wife of his captor, the rancher.] Obviously, nothing is going to happen between them, but he's testing the waters and asking himself, "Could I convince her to run off with me if the situation presented itself?"
JM: Or more simply, can he make that connection with her? Can he get her to drop all her guards and just connect with him? And he succeeds.
RS: The parallels between this movie and Copland are pretty obvious, but I think I can wedge in Walk the Line and still find a theme in your body of work. Here's the theme -- women don't like losers, so don't be a loser if you want the great woman.
JM: [laughs] If you see it, it's there. I think all people are attracted to people who accomplish things. I think people who vacillate, who are passive ... I think our age, the modern age, is the age of the passive hero, and I really think one of the most exciting things is when men are called to action, or women are called into action and have to do something. They have to meet a challenge. I don't think the message is as simple as -- what did you say?
RS: Just that women don't like losers.
JM: Well, that's exactly ... are you gonna throw me down and say there's a filmmaker who makes movies where women do like losers?
RS: No, but let me back it up a little with examples from your work. Johnny Cash's first wife in Walk the Line, who was going to continue to nag him forever if he didn't get out of there and go make something of himself. Certainly, Freddy in Copland was never going to succeed in getting Annabella Sciorra unless he got himself out of his rut and did something to impress her. Just my interpretation.
JM: Oh, I'm not attacking it -- I think the interesting thing for me is that playing by the rules sometimes gets you nothing. I think we all have to chart a course in our lives where we have to decide when we're going to play by the rules and when we're gonna break out of them. It takes a lot of courage to know when those moments are and to pick those moments. But without those risks taken, a life of just following the rules is hardly a life lived. I think that really remains true. You know what? I think Johnny Cash's first wife -- she was married to him when he got successful and they still couldn't get along, because they just weren't right for each other. It wasn't just that he was a loser. I mean, the honest truth, because I knew these people, Johnny Cash was a damaged person. He had damage. He had psychic damage from his childhood. He was hurt and he was depressed and his first wife was not capable of addressing that or facing that with him, so they could never be honest with one another. June Carter, because she had known it, she had seen addiction, she'd grown up around it, she'd seen people like him before -- she'd had a rehearsal in her life, with Hank Williams, who literally, she'd been singing with and her sister had gone out with only a month before he OD'd. She'd seen this. She knew what it looked like and she knew exactly what John Cash was doing to himself, and that kind of knowledge made him someone she could help. As opposed to just yell at or lash out at, which was what Vivian was stuck doing, because she just didn't know how to access any other side of him.
RS: I think it's odd that we constantly hear about the death and rebirth of the Western these days, when it seems to me like there are so many basic stories left to tell in the genre. I mean, we haven't even really seen Billy the Kid as a kid, scrapping it out on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I feel like this genre could have a flowering in the 21st century that maybe it didn't even have in the 20th.
JM: I absolutely agree. Saying the Western is dead would be like saying Sci-fi is dead. It's just stupid. It may be out of fashion, but it would be like saying the guitar is dead. It's like, fuck that. Of course it's alive. It may be out of fashion -- not many people played solo acoustic guitar in the disco era -- but it fuckin' came back. I think any vein of cinema that has been unexplored for a while is an opportunity -- it isn't a graveyard.
RS: Been great talking to you, James. Thanks for calling.
JM: No problem. I look forward to next time.
For more information go to www.310toyumathefilm.com
The answer is 3:10 to Yuma, a remake of the 1957 Western classic starring the great Van Heflin as a poor rancher who jumps at the chance to make some easy money by escorting a recently captured bandit, played by Glenn Ford, to the train station, where he'll be transported to prison. Russell Crowe steps into Ford's big shoes in the remake, with perpetual sourpuss Christian Bale playing the rancher who quickly discovers that escorting Ben Wade isn't such easy money after all -- Wade's gang is in hot pursuit, to set their man free. I recently spoke to Mangold from L.A.
Ryan Stewart: I saw the movie last night.
James Mangold: Wow, that's recently.
RS: Yeah. Those gunshots are still ringing in my ears. How'd you get them so loud?
JM: Well, it's all about the volume they play it at -- where did you see it? I wanna know what theater you were in.
RS: Dolby Screening Room, at 6th and 55th street.
JM: Well that's why -- you were in a fucking Dolby Screening Room. No wonder it sounded so good. Their fucking whole world is built on their speakers. But good, I'm glad. We did work a long time. Our sound effects guys actually went and fired guns off in the mountains of Colorado just to get the kind of reports you get back from the mountainside, the echos as they ring out. I mean, a lot of work went into that. Our mixer, you know, it was the same mixing team that was on Walk the Line -- brilliant guys. A lot of attention went into that stuff.
RS: Right. Speaking of gunshots, I've spoken to directors before who've had to stage gunfights, and they say it's maddening, like getting all the reaction shots in a dinner party scene. Were you pulling your hair out, filming gunfights with multiple participants?
JM: It was crazy. It was crazy. But you know, it's a family, the film -- it's a crew I've worked with on several movies before. My operator has been with me since Girl, Interrupted. So in many ways, we just kind of did the dance. You just go with it. And we shot fast. We shot the movie very fast. But yeah, it's a lot of set-ups. It's a lot to cover. The sooner you just kind of stop complaining and just do it ... you know you need to do it, so do it. Just shoot it.
RS: Let's talk about Russell Crowe's character. He's obviously a violent psychopath and all that, but you went out of your way to also show him having artistic abilities, and being contemplative and tender with Vinessa Shaw's character -- do you see him as being an educated man?
JM: I don't view him as an educated man, in the sense that I don't think Russell or I would think that his character actually went to school, but he is a smart guy and he has read books. And he clearly represents a learned and wise position, in relation to the world. I think that's really cool. I think part of what always interested me about this material -- and always interests me in general -- is having a quote-unquote villain who, once you get to know them, you like them. I think it's much more interesting than some dastardly, twirling his mustache while he plays with a thermo-nuclear device. It's like, I'd much rather have a guy whose motives are curious.
RS: Wade is a villain, but he's also a winner.
JM: Yeah. And you could argue, architecturally speaking, that he's actually the protagonist of the movie.
RS: Interesting.
JM: Because from the moment we introduce him, he's kind of a dissatisfied villain. In the sense that he isn't very happy doing what he's doing. You get a sense, even from the moment that Ben Foster arrives for the first time to tell him about the coach that's coming up the road, that he's bored out of his mind, Russell's character, with the idea of ... another coach. And I think that made for very interesting characters -- this guy who is almost over it. And that plays into the ending a little bit. I think he spends a lot of the movie looking for ways to actually get caught or to run away.
RS: The guys in Copland were sort of bored too, I remember. They were just subsistence-level criminals. You know, there's that moment when Sylvester Stallone's character says, "Their pools are all above ground." They're just grinding it out, making a living, and they get bored like everyone else.
JM: Yeah, I agree with that. For me, humanizing things on all sides is the most interesting thing in a movie. Humanize things, humanize the scale. I think it's really lame when people say the reason that ... I used to even chafe at the words "good guys" and "bad guys." I think it's so fuckin' lame. Even in the old movies, in Shane, who is the good guy? Shane, the killer, who comes and protects the family but has killed many innocent people in the past? I mean, the fact is that morality, when it's less easy, is more interesting and more like our lives. That, to me, has always been the hallmark of the Western. A lot of people refer to the Western with things like "black hat" and "white hat" and good guys and bad guys and they actually never were. The only Western that were ever like that were the really shitty Gene Autry Westerns. And the TV shows, like "Gunsmoke" or "Bonanza." But the movie Westerns, from the Peckinpah films to the Spaghetti Westerns, to the Clint Eastwood films and backing up to Ford and Stevens and Delmer Daves -- none of these guys' movies were about white hats and black hats, like The Lone Ranger. They were about men in gray areas. Revenge, anger, hatred, and conflict that was coming from the darkness in men's hearts.
RS: Well, in a lot of Clint Eastwood's movies, he was unquestionably the good guy. I'm thinking of the Man With No Name movies. Even if he was playing a gun for hire, you saw Clint Eastwood and immediately thought, "This is the guy I can get behind, this is the guy who I can trust."
JM: Right, but let me proposition you. [spoiler alert] At the end of this picture, wherever Russell Crowe is heading off to, I could start a Man With No Name movie with that character. Meaning that, you've been calling him a bad guy in our movie, but I could start a movie with the character from where he ends in our picture, and you could literally make a Man With No Name movie. Usually, Clint Eastwood played a man with a horrific past. You're just starting where, all the horrific shit he did is before the fade-in. I mean, Unforgiven -- he was a murderer! But we open and he's a farmer whose lost his wife. But he killed a lot of people in his day, for no good reason. I think that's what I'm talking about. There's a kind of darkness to the morality, and there isn't this fear, as there would be in a modern context, of constructing heroes who haven't sinned in the past.
RS: So what are the bottom lines for Ben Wade? He takes the easy path because there's no authority higher than the Pinkertons? There's nothing to believe in? Or is he a guy, in the more modern sense, who just has a screw loose and kills because something inside tells him to?
JM: No, I see him as a wounded person, with some damage and some anger. He was abandoned by his mother in a train station, with a bible. I think he has ... I mean, Russell plays this out really beautifully, and Russell could speak to it quite beautifully and eloquently. He has this idea of an un-benevolent God. He believes that the universe is not just. That, like the Apache believed, that God is not a just soul, he does what he wants, not necessarily what is right. And that our lives here on Earth are not necessarily the result of, like, being good. It's an interesting worldview, that Crowe's character kind of lives by. And if you notice, he never hurts a good person in the context of the entire movie. The only people he kills are pretty much scumbags.
RS: But he says to the kid at one point, "If I'd had a gun, you'd be dead."
JM: Yeah, but do you believe him?
RS: I don't know. Let me put it this way --
JM: How many times did he have a weapon and he could have ... when he had that fork and he took out the guy at the campfire, couldn't he have killed a couple more people? I mean, there's a level where I see -- I'm not telling you how to see it -- I see Ben Wade as a kind of a big cat who's so fuckin' bored with his life, toying with this ball of yarn, half-hoping he gets caught up in it, just so that he has the excitement of trying to get out of it. There's a level where he's so fuckin' bored when you meet him on that hillside. He doesn't give a shit about that coach. Another coach. Another fuckin' bag of money. Whatever. There's a level where, when he gets alone with Vinessa Shaw in Bisbee, the first thing he's saying to her is, "Jump out that back window with me." Why can't he go out the front window? Because he wants to escape his gang, too. He wants to get away from it all. He wants to get away from it all. He's got enough money. Have you ever had, like, dogs that you get sick of feeding them? You're like, "I wish I could just go away for three days and not have to fuckin' put down these bowls and walk them"? I think Russell is sick of owning this gang and having to keep them in line. They're a bunch of animals. It's like he has twelve Rottweilers. And it's like, "What is he gonna fuckin' do with them?"
RS: He gets a twinkle in his eye when there's a new challenge, and one of those times is when he's briefly alone with Gretchen Mol's character [the wife of his captor, the rancher.] Obviously, nothing is going to happen between them, but he's testing the waters and asking himself, "Could I convince her to run off with me if the situation presented itself?"
JM: Or more simply, can he make that connection with her? Can he get her to drop all her guards and just connect with him? And he succeeds.
RS: The parallels between this movie and Copland are pretty obvious, but I think I can wedge in Walk the Line and still find a theme in your body of work. Here's the theme -- women don't like losers, so don't be a loser if you want the great woman.
JM: [laughs] If you see it, it's there. I think all people are attracted to people who accomplish things. I think people who vacillate, who are passive ... I think our age, the modern age, is the age of the passive hero, and I really think one of the most exciting things is when men are called to action, or women are called into action and have to do something. They have to meet a challenge. I don't think the message is as simple as -- what did you say?
RS: Just that women don't like losers.
JM: Well, that's exactly ... are you gonna throw me down and say there's a filmmaker who makes movies where women do like losers?
RS: No, but let me back it up a little with examples from your work. Johnny Cash's first wife in Walk the Line, who was going to continue to nag him forever if he didn't get out of there and go make something of himself. Certainly, Freddy in Copland was never going to succeed in getting Annabella Sciorra unless he got himself out of his rut and did something to impress her. Just my interpretation.
JM: Oh, I'm not attacking it -- I think the interesting thing for me is that playing by the rules sometimes gets you nothing. I think we all have to chart a course in our lives where we have to decide when we're going to play by the rules and when we're gonna break out of them. It takes a lot of courage to know when those moments are and to pick those moments. But without those risks taken, a life of just following the rules is hardly a life lived. I think that really remains true. You know what? I think Johnny Cash's first wife -- she was married to him when he got successful and they still couldn't get along, because they just weren't right for each other. It wasn't just that he was a loser. I mean, the honest truth, because I knew these people, Johnny Cash was a damaged person. He had damage. He had psychic damage from his childhood. He was hurt and he was depressed and his first wife was not capable of addressing that or facing that with him, so they could never be honest with one another. June Carter, because she had known it, she had seen addiction, she'd grown up around it, she'd seen people like him before -- she'd had a rehearsal in her life, with Hank Williams, who literally, she'd been singing with and her sister had gone out with only a month before he OD'd. She'd seen this. She knew what it looked like and she knew exactly what John Cash was doing to himself, and that kind of knowledge made him someone she could help. As opposed to just yell at or lash out at, which was what Vivian was stuck doing, because she just didn't know how to access any other side of him.
RS: I think it's odd that we constantly hear about the death and rebirth of the Western these days, when it seems to me like there are so many basic stories left to tell in the genre. I mean, we haven't even really seen Billy the Kid as a kid, scrapping it out on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I feel like this genre could have a flowering in the 21st century that maybe it didn't even have in the 20th.
JM: I absolutely agree. Saying the Western is dead would be like saying Sci-fi is dead. It's just stupid. It may be out of fashion, but it would be like saying the guitar is dead. It's like, fuck that. Of course it's alive. It may be out of fashion -- not many people played solo acoustic guitar in the disco era -- but it fuckin' came back. I think any vein of cinema that has been unexplored for a while is an opportunity -- it isn't a graveyard.
RS: Been great talking to you, James. Thanks for calling.
JM: No problem. I look forward to next time.
For more information go to www.310toyumathefilm.com
zoetica:
The Western mythos runs deep in James Mangold's work, going all the way back to Copland, his gritty urban drama from 1997 about a gang of outlaws who live out on a lawless patch of land called North Jersey, well out of the reach of the civilizing influence of Manhattan. By the third act of that film,...
gerry_d:
great interview, ryan -- welcome aboard