Quick on the draw: Jeymes Samuel on remaking the western

Even Covid couldn’t stop the British film-maker reimagining the American genre – with one of the starriest Black casts imaginable

If you want to know who’s hot in Hollywood, have a look at the lineup for righteous and rowdy new western The Harder They Fall. It is produced by Jay-Z and features a magnificent seven: Idris Elba, Jonathan Majors, Regina King, Lakeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz, Delroy Lindo and RJ Cyler. Among such talent, it is the film’s writer-director, Jeymes Samuel, who has the lowest profile. But the 42-year-old Londoner isn’t a low-profile kind of guy. Even via video call, Samuel makes an entrance. He frequently refers to himself in the third person (“That Jeymes is one interesting fellow!”), and launches into detailed critiques of classic movies at the slightest provocation; his thoughts on Breakfast at Tiffany’s (“Holly Golightly is actually a really horrible character”), for instance, culminate in an a cappella rendition of Moon River. And that’s all within the first five minutes.

It is a personality to match the size of the vast vistas of the New Mexico desert where The Harder They Fall was shot, with a reported $90m (£65m) budget. The plot is a simple cowboy tale of revenge – Nat Love (Majors) hears that the man who killed his parents (Elba) has broken out of jail, then reassembles his old posse to seek justice – but it plays out in widescreen wonder: a standoff with a steam train, gangs galloping across the open prairie and plenty of daring shootouts in dusty frontier towns.

While Samuel may be new to film-making on such a scale, he is not new to the game. He has been making music since the turn of the millennium, producing and collaborating with an eclectic range of artists, including Damon Albarn, Mos Def and Charlotte Gainsbourg. In 2013, he worked with Jay-Z and Baz Luhrmann on the music for The Great Gatsby and released his own album, They Die By Dawn, under his musical moniker the Bullitts (movie buffs will note the nod to the 1968 car-chase classic starring Steve McQueen).

That album, which featured guest spots from Lucy Liu and Rosario Dawson, was his stepping stone into film-making – accompanied as it was by a 51-minute western of the same name, starring Dawson alongside Erykah Badu and Michael K Williams. Samuel became particularly close friends with Williams, who died suddenly last month. “It’s strange, man, speaking about him in past tense,” Samuel says. “As far as me being a film-maker that people wanted to work with, that started with Michael K Williams. This man had no proof that I can shoot anything and he was like: ‘I’m in!’”

As well as writing, directing and co-producing, Samuel has put together the soundtrack for The Harder They Fall which, as suggested by the title’s reference to the influential 1972 Jamaican crime film, combines reggae beats with Ennio Morricone-esque melodies. So is Samuel a musician-turned-film-maker? Or a film-maker who makes music? Neither, he says: “They come from the exact same place. When I’m writing and these words are coming out, so are melodies and song and score.”

This intermingling began on north-west London’s Mozart estate, where he grew up, the second youngest of five children, born to a Nigerian mother and an African-Brazilian father. It was a creative family. His older brother is Henry Olusegun Adeola Samuel, better known as the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Seal. It is their cinephile mother, however, whom Jeymes credits with setting him on his path: “She said her relationship to the western world came from cinema. It was like taking the plane every time she watched a movie.”

Watch a trailer for The Harder They Fall.

After Samuel was expelled from his first secondary school, he spent a formative few months at home in front of the TV. “Charles Laughton, John Mills, Jack Hawkins, Alastair Sim, Alec Guinness, David Lean: I’d know all about these actors and directors from my mum.” There were always musical instruments around the house, too, and by age 13, he’d got hold of a Bolex 16mm camera. “From there I was always shooting, always making music, and they would influence each other.”

Despite now spending much of his time in the US and making movies in the most archetypal of American genres, Samuel insists he remains British through and through. “Literally, you can walk on Portobello Road any time and you’ll see me with a bunch of my dudes – ‘dudes’ meaning guys and girls.” He’s so British, he says, he has Jacob’s Cream Crackers Fed-Exed to his sets. “I can eat a whole pack dry, as long as there’s a drink near me.” Not bourbon or sarsaparilla, mind: “I wash that shit down with Ribena!”

It was Hollywood westerns that really caught his imagination as a young film obsessive, and it was what the genre lacked that inspired most. “It’s almost like [130-minute-long] Tombstone was too short a movie. I wanted more! So I’d go and get more information about these characters and then I’d wanna know, where are the Black people? And where are the women?!” The young Samuel began reading up on the real historical people who’d eventually become characters in his films: the outlaw gang leader Rufus Buck, gun-toting mail carrier Stagecoach Mary, the aforementioned cowboy hero Nat Love. He soon discovered that the mostly white classic western was not based on historical fact, but a choice made by mostly white film-makers; the Smithsonian Institution estimates that around one-in-four cowboys of the old west were of African descent.

In part, The Harder They Fall is an attempt to put that right. “Just on a shallow level, look how much swag is missing when you delete Black people from the narrative,” Samuel says. “Look what happened when they put Lando Calrissian in [The] Empire Strikes Back!” – here, an impression of Princess Leia and Chewbacca swooning at the smooth-talking smuggler – “Billy Dee Williams was amazing.”

To that end, Samuel has cast his films with the swaggiest stars this side of the Mississippi. How does he bring all these big names together? It’s simple: “To me, great artists always want to make great art.” He doesn’t need to pitch, he says, he just talks about his own projects – and in Samuel’s presence, it is easy to understand how such enthusiasm could be infectious. “When I do something, I do it because I think it’s wicked, and The Harder They Fall is a wicked movie!”

As for the initial introductions, Samuel makes those for himself, the old west way: “I throw literally The. Best. Parties. On. The. Planet.” These gatherings, known as The Saloon, are legendary in Hollywood, he says. “I met Al Pacino in Soho House and he said to me: ‘You must be Jeymes Samuel. When are you throwing another one?’… Leonardo DiCaprio will be there, next to Jay-Z and the girl that served me a sandwich in Starbucks, and everyone is jamming.”

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To answer Pacino’s question, though, The Saloon doors are set to swing open again next month after a two-year hiatus, as the official afterparty for The Harder They Fall’s LA premiere. It will be a momentous occasion, and one that very nearly didn’t happen: Samuel’s galvanising spirit was put to the ultimate test in March 2020, when Elba contracted Covid and Netflix shut down production. “We were one day before shooting was due to start … And a lot of people thought we were shut down for good. I was receiving all these emails from people saying: ‘I’m so, so sorry!’”

Whoever sent those messages obviously didn’t know Samuel very well. When the production did eventually get back up and running – one of the first to do so during the pandemic – Samuel had to direct wearing a mask and goggles, at a distance of six feet. Instead of admitting defeat, he turned his inexperience to his advantage. “It was like learning to drive in a Bugatti; Mini Cooper, Bugatti – who cares? Just tell me where I’ve got to sit and brrrrrrm! I’m making this movie! I come from Kilburn Lane! Nothing is gonna stop The Harder They Fall from being made!”

The Harder They Fall is released in select cinemas and on Netflix on 3 November.

Contributor

Ellen E Jones

The GuardianTramp

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