Favreau’s Western has a dust-up with aliens
“Wait around,” Daniel Craig muttered, “and Indiana Jones might show up too.”
Craig, best known as 007, on this particular day was on location with “Cowboys & Aliens,” an audacious $180-million film that also stars “Raiders of the Lost Ark” hero Harrison Ford.
Both actors have brought grim, granite stares to the project, which leads to a nagging question: Is this film as silly as its title or as fierce as its famous faces?
“I’m not sure anyone knows what to make of this movie,” Craig said as he plucked away on a Beatles ballad. “But you know that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
The Jon Favreau-directed film, opening in theaters today, is set in the 1870s in a blister-scab town called Absolution that kneels before a cattle baron named Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde (Ford).
One day a wounded man (Craig) arrives with a strange metal device affixed to his wrist and zero memory. The Man With No Name, it turns out, is an Old West victim of alien abduction.
The film, which also stars Olivia Wilde and Sam Rockwell, is structured like a Western and (somewhat) resists the contemporary approach of nonstop action in favor of building toward a big showdown, a la “High Noon.”
At the same time, it promises the visual-effects velocity and crackle of today’s summer movies.
The core of that concept, and the film’s title, come from an obscure, small-press comic book series by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. Its potential has brought together a startling posse of Hollywood big names.
Ron Howard and Brian Grazer are two of the producers. Steven Spielberg, as executive producer, was so engaged by the possibilities of the story that he arranged for Favreau and two of the screenwriters, Damon Lindelof (“Lost”) and Roberto Orci (“Star Trek”), to join him for a private screening of John Ford’s “The Searchers.”
“He sat over our shoulders at a screening room on the Warner Bros. lot and gave us a running commentary,” Favreau said with marvel in his voice.
“What happened with this film is you had creators like Ron Howard and Steven who are very passionate about the Western genre and saw here an opportunity to tap into that in a big and crowd-pleasing way.”
In preview screenings, fan and blogger audiences have been upbeat about the film and its gritty action, which has been compared to “3:10 to Yuma” in its intensity.
There’s humor in the movie, but it never winks at the audience, said Orci, who added that the guiding sensibility was to keep the peril real.
The history lessons went beyond Spielberg’s screening room. On the set, Craig and Ford both spoke of the celluloid past: “My Darling Clementine,” “Destry Rides Again,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
“The conventions of a real Western basically are terse language and anamorphic frame – you see things, and you appropriate a lot of information visually – and it’s spare and focused and the relationships are spare and focused,” Ford said with familiar squint.
“And that’s what I’m loving about it, there’s no wasted language or wasted energy. You really have a focus on the true ambition of a scene, and there’s time to leave atmosphere and air around it.”
For Favreau, talking to Howard and Spielberg only underlined the risks and rewards. Howard directed “The Missing,” a 2003 Western that Favreau greatly admires, and its commercial failure is hard for the younger director to think about for too long.
“That scares the hell out of me, because that film had everything,” he said.
Favreau sees the lack of Westerns today as an opportunity as well as a challenge.
“This generation of young moviegoers aren’t conversant in it, but I think when you see them playing video games like Red Dead Redemption I think they’re open to the power of these stories if they can be presented in a context that’s exciting,” he said.
“Where Westerns go wrong is when people try to do a new take, they try to modernize it.”
Still, adding a flying saucer or two can’t hurt.
“Look, even great Westerns, films like ‘Unforgiven,’ they can win Academy Awards and they still aren’t (commercial) powerhouses where studios can justify the high budgets or put them up against big releases,” Favreau said.
“Fortunately, alien invasion films are, worldwide, a genre that people are very comfortable investing in. It gave us permission to really …”
Craig, sitting nearby, finished the sentence for him: “… spend some money.”