Uncover the Untold Secrets Behind Re-inventing the Western with Joe Cornet on SYS Podcast Episode 538
Joe Cornet
He was a co-creator and he was also the producer as well, one of the producers, but my origin story with Alexander is kind of funny because we had a mutual friend, Sean Murray, who’s a great composer of music, film, soundtracks, and he’s got, I can’t even tell you how many films he had scored in the last 30 years, even he’s lost track, and he’s done a lot of major scores like for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and just a whole ton of great credits. Anyway, he and I were working together on my third film, Promise, so this is several years back, and he thought it would be a good idea for me to meet Alexander, and so we met, and this was sometime in late 2020, and we just, we hit it off, and Alex and I, and we started discussing, let’s make a motion picture together, and at first I pitched the idea of another Western to him, and he listened, and he was very intrigued by the idea because, as he put it, you know, who would imagine him in a Western? But he came back to me and he said, I’d like to do this, I’d like to tackle this genre, but can we reframe it so I can, I can fit in, in my image, in the way I present myself? I said absolutely, so we came up with the story, and the great Craig Hammond wrote the script, and that of course became Gunfight at Rio Bravo. That was our first film together. The Wide West is our fourth film together, which will be my seventh feature film that I have in international release, and the way that came about was about a year and a half ago, one of Alexander’s very dear and closest friend, Andrew Freund, who is the head of the USA Sumo Association, and he travels all over the world representing Sumo wrestling, and between him and Alexander having a conversation without me one day, they thought it would be, what if we were to incorporate the idea of this ancient Japanese art and sport into a Western context? And we kind of use this as our template. Back in the early 1970s, there was a very famous movie with Charles Bronson, Elaine Delaun, and Toshiro Mafuni called Red Sun. That dealt more with samurai and ronin in the Old West. It’s a cool movie. I advise anybody to check it out. So we all got together and we figured that, well, you know, there was a true story in 1907, a contingent of Sumo wrestlers came to this country to meet with Teddy Roosevelt, and this really happened. And we thought, wouldn’t it be fun if they got stuck in some dangerous gambling town, their train breaks down, and they got stuck in the middle of, you know, a lot of problems. And so that’s basically what we did. And we also have some martial arts in there because there’s Kaz Kobayashi, who plays the manager of the Sumos in the film. He is a great martial artist himself. And we have some great sword fights with him in the saloon and elsewhere. And one of the two Sumos we have in it is an expert at with a bow and arrow. And believe me, we exploited that as well. So we’ve got a lot of different elements that are not normally in a Western. And I defy you to tell me when the Sumo has ever appeared in a Western. And initially, when this idea was put forth to me, I thought, we’ve got to be very careful here. Because if we don’t present it the right way, you know, all of a sudden, we’re in Mel Brooks land, you know, we’re like the saloon fight at the end of blazing saddles that spills over into the MGM musical stage set. So Craig Hammond, again, along with Andrew Freund, concocted the story, Craig wrote the script. And I thought it was pretty good. And so with some minor changes to it, we filmed it. And I didn’t know what we were going to wind up with, I had a pretty good idea. But, you know, I was very concentrated on not making this look silly, but also doing it for the hoot that it is. And when we premiered it in LA, we actually had a screening for it at the Japan LA Foundation back in May. I was not sure what the audience would say. And we had like, I don’t know, 300 people at the screening. And they went wild. And a bunch of audience members came up to me afterwards and said, oh my God, this thing is a hoot. It’s crazy. It’s wild. It’s chaotic. I’ve never seen anything like this before. And so I was very pleased with what we had. And I’ve gotten a lot of nice notices about it. And it’s just a wild ride. It’s very different from anything I’ve ever made. It’s very different from the real Bravo franchise movies. It’s very different from my horror stuff. It’s very different from my early Westerns, which you know that I tried to make very kind of more serious classic traditional statements in my first three Westerns. This throws all that to the wind and it’s just wild.
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