Interview of the screen writers of 3:10 to Yuma: Michael Brandt and Derek Haas

After publishing two interviews of Mangold, I have found another interview of Michael Brandt and Derek Haas. Brandt and Haas are the screen writers of 3:10 to Yuma. These two brilliant scripts writers wrote scripts of 2 Fast 2 Furious. Despite knowing that not too many western movies are made these days, the two writers decided to write the script of a movie remake which was a big challenge in itself. Both Brandt and Haas grew up in Texas watching western movies and they know the conventions but the biggest obstacle was remaining honest to the original story structure at the same time bringing in some fresh twist to match the test of the present audience. Here are some questions from the interview published in IESB:

IESB.NET: Okay, so, how much guidance or inspiration did you get from the original? Did you change anything?
Derek: Yeah, we changed quite a bit. The original movie is almost like a two-act play, but the original movie pretty much takes place with Dan deciding that he's going to help take Ben Wade and put him on a train and then you cut to a hotel room and they're waiting for a train, and that become the second half of the movie. What Michael and I recognized was that there was an opportunity to basically create a new second act, a new chapter to the short story by Elmore Leonard, kind of the third act of the movie, and we said let's put the town a two days' ride away, and by the way they're going to have to ride along the path where the rail road is being put down, so there's literally a gorge, and Indian country, and a Chinese labor camp where they're laying the rails and blasting through, and come up on the town, which is a railroad town, which in our research we found were just dens of inequity for whores and gamblers and people trying to separate the railroad workers from their money, it just became a great way to update the original. And then the other thing that we did was in the original movie the son character is barely in it, just kinda in the first act, and we thought, what an excellent way to be able to see the movie through fresh eyes, as this morality tale that plays out through the son as he's idolizing the Russell Crowe character, Ben Wade, this kind of rock star in the West, and his father, who he is disappointed in, and he's got to watch his father do this thing.

IESB.NET: Okay, is there anything you wante to add to the script that just couldn't be done?
Michael: There's always a lot of that. We had a pretty big scene we had to cut because of budget that plays over a gorge, with a cable car that was transporting people across the gorge, and we had a big accident set on that which they ended up having to set on dry land because of budget, but other than that I think for the most part, everything we envisioned action-wise made it into the movie.

IESB.NET: What are your thoughts on Crowe and Bale, are they what you imagined for the characters?
Michael: They're more than we ever imagined. There's no way . . . They are the two perfect actors for these parts, you know, the rock star gunslinger who is full of charisma, who can smile and also kill you, is the perfect role for Russell Crowe, and there aren’t a lot of people on the face of the earth who can play that part and probably know they can play it as well as he does. And then Christian Bale has such a pathos to him, and just a real sense of true actors acting, and threw himself into the role putting, and honestly when Derek and I were envisioning these parts, we would have been laughed at if we'd said we're thinking Russell Crow and Christian Bale, so we really couldn't have asked for any more.

James Mangold also helped a lot in writing the script. Mangold himself is also a talented screen writer and he gave them a general idea of what he is looking for in the script which also helped the script writers. In the movie credit list, name of Halsted Welles, the script writer of 50's 3:10 to Yuma has also been included as per the rule of the screen writer's guild.

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