It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think that the Western went away for a while because part of its function was that it used to be America's action film.
But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.
Each time you see a Western movie, it's a good reflection of where things are in the world at that time. It's probably one of the purest forms of cinema that really tells you where the world is.
'West' is one of those scripts that, when it came out, everyone wanted a piece of it and everyone wanted to be involved in it.
Westerns are simple stories where there's good and there's evil and where people had a sense of space and freedom. Growing up in the city, as a kid, you've never really seen that before. It's a beautiful dream to go from concrete to big skies, dirt and horses.
When I was growing up in the '60s I would have thought that westerns would last forever.
Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.
A generation before, it had been sagebrush and coyotes; a generation later, it was a burgeoning movie town. But for that brief idyllic time in 1910, Hollywood looked like the perfect place for a successful writer to settle down, build his dream house, and maybe do some gardening.
Lionsgate and Lorenzo di Bonaventura saw my Korean Western-style film, 'The Good, the Bad, the Weird,' and probably felt that I would be right for 'The Last Stand,' which could be classified as a modern Western.
It often disturbs me, when I see a film set in a historical time, that the people are too modern.