Why The Harder They Fall’s director would rather hug a horse than a Wookiee

Two minutes spent talking with Jeymes Samuel the writer, and his Netflix Western is available. The harder they fall, the more difficult.It suddenly seems to make more sense. Samuel, a British singer-songwriter and producer (under the name The Bullitts), talks energetically with his hands and his body, periodically bursting into little snippets of song when whatever he’s currently saying coincides with the lyrics of a favorite tune. His air guitar is his accompaniment as he belts out the movie’s theme tune. He also talks with a vibrant, energetic energy about his career.

It was like a sudden surge of energy. They fall harder the harder they workClear face. It’s an overpacked movie, stuffed with actors who’ve earned enthusiastic fandoms — Idris Elba, Jonathan Majors, Regina King, Zazie Beetz, LaKeith Stanfield, Delroy Lindo, and more. It’s similarly overstuffed with ideas and subplots, not all of which come into focus. You can see the difference between humor and sincerity. It also demonstrates flashy style mixed with gritty emotions. Its score is particularly eclectic, jumping from Jay-Z and CeeLo Green to Seal (Samuel’s brother, incidentally) and Kid Cudi, from loping reggae to dreamy soul to hard-charging hip-hop. And all of that seems like a perfect match for Samuel’s eagerness and energy in conversation.

Samuel found it particularly crucial to have the music perfected for his film. “I see music and I hear film, so to speak,” he tells Polygon. “In my brain, they kind of exist as the same thing. This film needed a signature. Sergio Leone gave Ennio Morricone his signature. He’d take an electric guitar, which was a fairly new instrument in the 1960s, and give you [vocalizes the theme from Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly]. Elmer Bernstein, on the other hand, would arrange a huge orchestra to provide us with music. [vocalizes the main theme from The Magnificent Seven].”

Photo by David Lee/Netflix

Samuel laughs as he runs through these iconic Western tunes, using “ding de ding” noises to hit the notes, and breathing out the “ha! ha!” exhalations of Morricone’s production. “That was the orchestral West,” he says, grinning. “The Big Country! The Searchers! True Grit! I searched for these sounds and sat with my guitar, the footage and was enjoying them. Ages. The secret to my success was in the old-school reggae dub. It’s super-cowboy! It’s super-Western!”

Samuel notes that reggae may not be associated with cowboys or the American West today, although there is no reason to until 1950 for orchestras to be associated with this era. “None of that was originally cowboy music!” he says. “NoneIt was actually music from the Old West. That’s just how we came to think of it, because that was the music of the day in Hollywood. To give the movie its Afrocentric Western sound, I used the old-school reggae we listened too growing up. That choice was really important.”

Samuel was heavily influenced by the art Samuel saw as a child The harder they fall, the more difficult. It was also a desire to make Westerns in the first instance. He says as he was growing up, Westerns were “Always on television,” and he associates them strongly with the warmth of curling up against his parents and watching movies together. He said that he felt more connected to Westerns than with any other favourite genres.

“I love all cinema, I love all genres of film,” he says. “It’s just that Westerns seemed RealTo me. You Learn more, Star Wars and sci-fi are every kid’s dream, but you knowYou don’t have any friends who look like Chewbacca. A horse is something I could relate to. I didn’t have an android that could squawk like C-3PO, but I could relate to a gunslinger.”

He doesn’t mean that too literally, he says — “It’s not that people around me were wearing cowboy hats and spurs.” But the settings and situations in Westerns seemed more visceral than the things he saw in fantasy-oriented movies. “People in Westerns just seemRealität. It felt like the real world. Sci-fi seems more dreamlike. You could watch it and really enjoy it, but I couldn’t relate to Yoda the way I could relate to Gary Cooper or Gregory Peck.”

Similar They fall harder, Samuel’s first filmed project, They die by dawnThe star-studded Black Western, starring stars such as, draws inspiration from the American West’s real-life Black characters. This 51-minute film stars The Wire’s Michael K. Williams alongside Bokeem Woodbine, Erykah Badu, Isaiah Washington, and Rosario Dawson, came out in conjunction with his Bullitts album They Die at Dawn, and Other Short Stories. Both projects came from Samuel’s need to reshape a genre he loved in a way that acknowledged truths about the Old West that Hollywood movies had ignored.

“There were definitely things I had to update,” Samuel says. “The scope through which they allowed us to look through to tell the stories was just too narrow. The women in the group were all subordinate. You can’t take the Western lifestyle like this. Johnny Guitar, starring Joan Crawford, the dopest actor of all time — one of the most powerful actors we’ve ever seen on screen, her and Bette Davis — they’ll still be the love interest, in subservience to one storyline or another.”

Classic Westerns also ignored the fact that 25% of cowboys in real life were Black and the West was just as appealing to people of color than it is for whites who rule Hollywood Westerns. “The people of color in Westerns were always really stereotypical, and almost less than human,” Samuel says. “An Asian person will always be doing the laundry, Mexicans will be wearing white and running around like Speedy Gonzales, who was a cartoon take on how Hollywood viewed Mexicans in the Old West. Blacks were slaves, or something similar. So I really had to update that narrative.”

His entire motivation for creating the website is revealed by him. The harder they fall, the more difficult.It was meant to demonstrate that non-white women were not uncommon in the West. “And they were absolute gangsters!” he exults. “The real-life Cherokee Bill, the character played by LaKeith Stanfield, when he was going to his execution, they said ‘Any last words?’ He said, ‘I came here to die, not make a speech.’ These people were Gs! [Hoots] And we’ve never seen them onscreen!”

Samuel did not want to escape the whitewashing and remaking of Westerns. However, he wanted to preserve the classic tropes that he enjoyed about this genre. “There are certain tropes you Have to hold onto,” he says. “Bank robberies! Train robberies! Jailbreaks! Quick-draw! The quick-draw! Greg Nice says it all. [Sings] ‘this is how you take the old to the new.’”

Photo by David Lee/Netflix

Samuel speaks for many characters. The harder they fall, the more difficult. were written with specific actors in mind, and that he generally “was lucky” in getting the specific people he wanted. But even though he’d visualized them onscreen, “even if it’s just for inspiration, to channel a role through,” they still surprised him repeatedly during shooting.

“It’s the craziest thing. It was almost like magic on set, every single day,” he says. “EverybodySurprising me! Everyone did things I didn’t see them doing. I didn’t know Jonathan Majors could ride for leather. The guy can gallop for miles without using his hands. He also shoots his opponents. Bam, bam and bam! He was so fast with his camera that we had to follow him. I didn’t even know he could ride a horse when I cast him [as real-life cowboy Nat Love]. I asked Jonathan, ‘When did you learn to ride a horse?” He said, ‘I can’t ride a horse… but Nat Love can.’

“And RJ Cyler, with the guns and his gunplay, took everyone by surprise. Regina King had a scene in which [her character]Trudy Smith talks to [Zazie Beetz’ character]Trudy, Stagecoach Mary and Trudy are cutting this apple with a sharp knife. Regina removed the apple in one monologue, not letting it break. She just made a curling peel until it was flat on the ground. I said ‘Where did you learn to Do that?’ She just looks at me like [gruff Regina King impression] ‘That’s what I do.’ Everyone was awesome. It was like everyone knew this was a magical thing we were doing, and everyone just came with magic.”