Jeymes Samuel: ​‘Movie west­erns have lied to us our whole lives’

Jeymes Samuel’s The Hard­er They Fall rep­re­sents the Old West in a bold and dynam­ic debut fea­ture that fol­lows Nat Love (Jonathan Majors) as he seeks revenge on Rufus Buck (Idris Elba) and his for­mi­da­ble gang. Co-pro­duced by Shawn Carter and boast­ing an all-star cast of Regi­na King, Lakei­th Stan­field, Del­roy Lin­do and Zazie Beetz, here the direc­tor talks about his love for the genre and the neces­si­ty to reimag­ine our approach to peri­od cinema.

LWLies: How did the project start?

Samuel: The idea for the sto­ry came to me about 10 years ago. I shot a proof of con­cept short film called They Die by Dawn, which was my ini­tial for­ay into the Old West. I wrote a few drafts of it, myself and Jay‑Z were just work­ing and putting it togeth­er. Then in the last stretch I brought in writer Boaz Yakin, he’s a friend of mine. He did a revi­sion just to have addi­tion­al eyes on the structure.

Why a west­ern for your debut feature?

Well, I love cin­e­ma and I love Old West west­erns, but we’ve been lied to our whole lives. Native Amer­i­cans weren’t cir­cling the wag­ons of white peo­ple – it didn’t hap­pen. And to show women char­ac­ters in posi­tions of weak­ness and peo­ple of colour as sub­servient. Slav­ery was abol­ished in the 1860s so there were decades-worth of Black peo­ple in the Old West. Since I was a kid peo­ple would argue with me for years that Black Cow­boys didn’t exist, so I would do a lot of research on it. Then I just put all the ones I found togeth­er like The Avengers. The sto­ry is fic­tion but the peo­ple existed.

How did you rec­on­ciled these depic­tions with your love for the genre?

You fall in love with the aes­thet­ic and you fall in love with the sto­ries, but it’s the telling of them that you have a prob­lem with. Black peo­ple have a set­ting in us called ​‘auto erase’; women have it too. Like you watch things and auto­mat­i­cal­ly erase the insults as you go. With west­erns we’ll be acute­ly aware of how we’re being treat­ed in them, just like with most gen­res. But if we don’t watch those movies there’ll be hard­ly any cin­e­ma we can watch. That’s why in The Hard­er They Fall you don’t hear the N‑word once.

You lit­er­al­ly kill it in its tracks.

I don’t believe there was ever a time where you could just run up and call us a ​‘bunch of N‑words’ and we’d wil­ful­ly accept it. Black peo­ple were enslaved, not slaves, and it’s a big dif­fer­ence. And for all the peo­ple that were enslaved, there were always revolts, which is why so many of us died! If you’re mak­ing a peri­od piece, why does it mean we have to be sub­servient? Those peo­ple are unimag­i­na­tive and just in love with the word and the oppor­tu­ni­ty to exploit. In my movies there’ll be cin­e­mat­ic repercussions.

Could you talk about the soundtrack?

I com­posed the score myself. I want­ed to utilise reg­gae because dub and its ori­gins are real­ly close to West­ern music. If you lis­ten to Dub at its foun­da­tions, it’s like a sound­track. It’s already like a score for West­erns [begins to make Dub nois­es]. The rules are exact­ly what Ennio Mor­ri­cone was fol­low­ing with Ser­gio Leone. It’s gul­ly, it’s men­ac­ing, the two go hand in hand. And then I’ll go to Fela Kuti and afrobeat, to the Fisk Jubilee Singers. I would utilise all of these sounds and gen­res to cre­ate one son­ic land­scape because they’re all Black expres­sion. There’s a scene where Wiley Escoe gets beat­en down, so I wrote a song styled like an old Negro spir­i­tu­al called ​‘Do Unto Oth­ers’ and when he’s lying on the floor, that par­tic­u­lar song turns into an afrobeat ver­sion of the theme, The Hard­er They Fall [starts singing ​‘Waha­la they come, Waha­la they come’]. Waha­la is a Niger­ian word for drama.

Can you talk a bit about your visu­al influ­ences and the set design?

My set dec­o­ra­tor is a man called Mar­tin Whist. I’m in love with pret­ty much every­thing this guy does, so it was a joy to work with him. Visu­al­ly I was inspired by two things: the painter Kadir Nel­son – his colour palette informed what I want­ed to do with this movie. I didn’t real­ly have cin­e­matog­ra­phy ref­er­ences for my mood board. And then the build­ings of New Orleans. Hir­ing some­one like Mar­tin was amaz­ing, he just under­stood the movie. Cause The Hard­er They Fall is a unique expe­ri­ence. What­ev­er you’re doing, obey your crazy. When you have a crazy thought you have it because you can see it, no one else can. Obey your crazy, and it will take you to where you need to go.