‘Magnificent Seven’ cast on how diversity helped make a modern western

Pratt, on the subject of which movie the new “Magnificent Seven” best resembles, gave a simple answer: “It’s a bunch of guys, seven of us, and we’re magnificent”. He said, “If this is a hit, I’d be open to it, sure”. It should also be mentioned that this is the last film composed by the now deceased James Horner, and as you would expect the soundtrack is just fine with a number of homages to the original theme and tunes from the classic.

A wild west shoot-em-up with a high body count and a serious inonic actor, Denzel Washington, on a mission as a bounty hunter to assemble human firepower and protect a small town from a land grabber, played with sweaty cruelty, by Peter Sarsgaard. These include a Southern gentleman and Civil War veteran/sharpshooter named Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke) and his partner Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee), a Mexican outlaw called Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a young Indian warrior named Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier), and a frontiersman tracker and trapper named Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio).

The film is on pace to score one of the biggest domestic openings ever for a Western – if not the biggest, not accounting for inflation.

As a result, watching The Magnificent Seven can be a chore. “It’s a diverse cast of characters that’s really reflective of the modern world”. We were going down a list of actors – Tom Cruise was on board at one point, before I came on, and I thought ‘Tom Cruise would be cool.’ It didn’t work out on that end and when I came on I thought ‘Denzel Washington would do it.’ And who’s the Steve McQueen of today?

Fuqua also loves capturing some lovely landscapes with some excellent cinematography on display. “I don’t know the rules of what a western is – I don’t want to know”. Serving people who can’t serve themselves.

In the film, Washington takes on his first western playing Sam Chisolm, the leader of The Magnificent Seven, and of course his performance is generating Oscar buzz.

It’s 1879 and the town of Rose Creek has been taken over by Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), an industrialist who’s interested in the gold mine just outside of town. This is who I am, this is who these people are, this is what the story is.