3:10 to Yuma: Interview of James Mangold

Before reading this interview, I did not know that this man directed the movie Walk the Line. Yes, I am a big fan of Walk the Line. I admit that I never heard Johnny Cash but I liked Walk the line very much. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon were great. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is where June says that Johnny Cash that his voice was steady like a train, sharp like a razor.

Recently, Mangold directed the remake of 50’s classic movie, 3:10 to Yuma. In an interview with Dark Horizons ,he talked about the movie and what made him take the story of a 50’s classic movie and do it again. Below is given some of the questions and answers of the interview.

Question: You know, I was talking to a director the other day who said to me how incredibly hard it is to make films in Hollywood and even though you have this track record and the last film that you did won a huge amount of acclaim, is it tough even with an established track record to make the kinds of passion projects that you want to make?
Mangold: Well I don’t even have to be self-revelationary to answer our question. I can tell you the facts. This was a movie set up at Sony and they didn’t make it.

Question: 3:10 to Yuma has been around a while ---
Mangold: Well I started it with Cathy Konrad in development when we were making Identity in about 2002. And when it came time to make this picture, after Walk the Line, Sony passed. And they graciously they let us take it with the underlying rights which they owned, because the original film and script were their underlying rights, and we shopped around town and every single studio in town passed.

Question: Why?
Mangold: You’d have to ask them. You could call any one of them and ask why, ‘cause they all passed on Walk the Line and they all passed on this. All I could tell you is that my own suspicion is that there’s something similar between these two films which is that they take place between New York and LA in the world that exists previously – they’re both periods. One was exploring the life of a musician who, I don’t how many people in Los Angeles studios in green light positions listen to Johnny Cash and understood the kind of connection he has and I think that studios similarly are afraid of country music and what that means. I think similarly they’re afraid of westerns and they’re afraid that Nintendo playing people can’t get used to the world of watching the latest young stars in Spandex that doesn’t somehow translate to a western.
I mean honestly when we made Walk the Line, Ray hadn’t come out - we were pretty much simultaneous with them, about a month and a half schedule wise behind. So a lot of times where people act like our movie was pulled together in response to Ray, we were little wrapping about a month or two after they did. I hadn’t even heard of the film until I was finishing shooting Walk the Line, but I think they had a hard time getting that movie financed. I mean that reality is that that it’s really hard to get ambitious movies about people in any period made and all you have to do is look at the films this fall, last fall and the ones that are interesting and then trace who green-lit them. The truth is that most of them are pickups or feature alternate financing or independent in nature. The studios are almost taking a pass right now on real filmmaking.

Question: That seems so depressing to me.
Mangold: It’s depressing but as long as the movies are getting made it’s not completely depressing and I think that the chickens will come home to roost in a sense. Let me put it this way, the seventies are a great moment in movies and emerged from one of the worst periods of movies. There is in a sense that whenever the paradigm is shifting, there is an opportunity for alternate methods of getting movies made. That’s how the whole Sundance generation happened, it’s how the whole Miramax moment happened. Corporations are just not going to be on the pulse of anything, hey’re going to be making what worked last year until it doesn’t work any more. So when finally one of these Marvel or DC movies fails, then another one and another one, I think they’ll think again.

When asked about his idea of making the movie he said that during his Columbia University years, he did thorough research on the movie. It was introduced to him by his teacher, Alexander McKendrick. He felt that the film had a great story to tell and it can be told in a totally new way; the way he want it to be told and that what made him make this film. Mangold feels that he has two great actors who perfectly suit the character requirements; especially, Russell Crowe. Crowe is a great horse rider. Presently, there are very few actors in Hollywood who, at the same time can ride a horse, control it and deliver his dialogues smoothly; Crowe can do all these things. On the other hand, Christian bale has proven himself to be one to top actors in Hollywood.

Related article:

Dark Horizons