March 12, 2020: After spending over a decade teasing out a story of real-life Black cowboys, Jeymes Samuel was finally gearing up to shoot his feature directorial debut, TheHarderTheyFall. And then the pandemic placed everything on hold.
, fresh off her supporting actress Oscar win for “If Beale Street Could Talk.” Netflix had put up $90 million to fund Samuel’s radical reimagining of what he calls the New West, an epic canvas populated by bandits and lawmen, saloonkeepers and stagecoach robbers, gunslingers and sharpshooters, all of whom are Black.
“It’s amazing beyond words, the poetry of it,” Samuel says, revealing that he actually sneaked into the festival’s 2004 screening of “Ray” and, after the Q&A, chatted up director Taylor Hackford about what a powerhouse performance King gave in that film. Now she’s in his movie.On Oct. 22, King and the cast of “The Harder They Fall” will ride into select cinemas for an exclusive theatrical run before launching on Netflix Nov.
As a kid, Samuel took it upon himself to begin researching the Old West, discovering stories about outlaws and renegades like Rufus Buck, Nat Love and Cherokee Bill, reading about these Black people and becoming immersed in their mythology much in the way that other kids embraced comic books. “The Harder They Fall” is a full-service “Jeymes Samuel film,” with the newcomer not only directing the movie but co-writing the screenplay with Boaz Yakin, as well as producing the project and overseeing the music with longtime collaborator Shawn Carter — better known as Jay-Z.
“Our ambition is for it to be one of the great movies of all time. Not one of the great Black films of all time. Not one of the great Black Westerns of all time,” Nagenda recounts. “We might not reach those heights, but we should be thinking ‘The Godfather’ in terms of its import and ability to transcend the genre.”
Elba had been in the “Harder They Fall” mix for more than a decade, when Samuel was first laying out plans for the New West, and approached his good friend and musical collaborator about playing Buck. “I felt sorry for him because there he was, greenlit movie with the most incredible cast and then told, ‘No, we’re not making this now,’” Elba says.
“My car was outside, and he was just like, ‘Where are you going?’ And I said, ‘To London.’ And he was like, ‘No, you’re not. You have to stay here, and we have to weather this storm,’” Samuel recounts. “I looked him in his eye, and I knew I couldn’t leave him. So we both stayed in New Mexico writing songs together, not leaving the mental environment of the film, staying in the trenches, until we were back up and running.
The 42-year-old musician-turned-filmmaker, who is also the younger brother of Grammy winner Seal, sees the world in almost symphonic terms. He speaks rhythmically and often launches into a cappella renditions of songs, drumming on his chest or the table during the interview, as he explains how they fit into the storyline.
Music found its way into Samuel’s soul early on. Raised on West London’s Kilburn Lane, the son of Francis and Mummy Samuel says, “I grew up in the hood in London, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t downright musical and hilarious at times.” But “They Die by Dawn” was a small-scale production, self-funded and filmed in four days, which was not how Samuel intended to make his theatrical splash. “As a Black person, if we get a proper Western, I need bank robberies, train robberies, jailbreaks, quick draws,” he says. “I need all of the tropes, and then let me turn it on its head and do something entirely new with it, speaking the language of where we are today.
Majors says he and Samuel have since developed a very deep collaboration. “We’ve established this artistic community between us where we talk about music, art, popular culture, all these things,” he explains. “It’s like a Warhol and Basquiat; it’s like a Scorsese, Leo or De Niro; or Spike and Denzel. It’s one of those things where it’s like you’ve just always been together and just didn’t know it.
The first set-up for the movie was a shot of the cuffed hands of Elba’s Rufus Buck coming out of his jail cell. Samuel says everything came into focus when the actor arrived on set. It wasn’t his friend who’d arrived, but instead his outlaw alter ego. From Elba’s perspective, he remembers looking at Samuel and feeling grateful that the director’s decades-long journey had not been in vain.
The second half of the mantra came from his second second AD Ricky Weaver — Denzel Washington’s nephew, John David’s cousin. Tears flowed on the final day of filming. The director embraced Majors while the thespian was still atop his horse , as all of the memories from the intense experience rushed back at once. “That last shot was a tearful moment, and then I had to race and get on a plane,” Samuel says. The director was heading back to London just in time for his son’s birthday, which was two days away.
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