After a layover in Venice earlier this month, Walter Hill’s latest film, “Dead for a Dollar,” headed west for its US premiere.
The director was prolific for films like “The Warriors” and “48 Hrs.” “Streets of Rage” and “Red Heat” are a Wednesday evening talk at the Directors Guild Theater in Los Angeles. The film stars Willem Dafoe, Christoph Waltz, Benjamin Bratt, and Warren Burke, who is already famous for his revival of the Western genre, praised for making another Western.
Frankly speaking, Dafoe, who last worked with Hill in 1991 on “Streets of Rage,” described the director as a “no-nonsense guy.”
“He’s kind of the same guy and I’m kind of the same guy. I had a good experience in Streets of Fire. He gave me a lot. He remembers Dafoe, he gave me fun things to do.” He is very direct and knows the movie well; He’s kind of a no-nonsense guy. He has that great thought, but he doesn’t wear it on his sleeve. He is smart and wise and this only comes from his humility. He has great knowledge and is happy to be around.”
Waltz said he was drawn to the film because the genre had become so rare in Hollywood.
“This is a movie that is no longer being made often, and Walter is a director who is working or doing work that is no longer done often, and stories that deal with moral and ethical dilemmas in such clarity are no longer dealt with that often,” he said.
Pratt, who plays ruthless crime boss Tiberio Vargas, one of the film’s main villains, said Burke re-invented the genre.
“The Western genre is so likable because you enter it as a member of the audience with a very clear expectation of what you are going to get. There will be a battle between good and evil, and there will be a showdown at the end of the story,” Pratt said. “You get that here, but what Walter does is he creates – and I would never say he would say this but, someone said to me this way – He created a new Western on some issues of the day, and we are talking about issues of sex and race in 1897, which are so strongly present even in modern society, he touches on them in a way that makes you think of These issues and how they are never resolved, yet it doesn’t get you over your head with it.”
Hill said he came up with the topic when he read about outlaws in Oklahoma and discovered the story of Chris Madsen, a Danish soldier in the French Foreign Legion who emigrated to the United States, joined the army, and later became a lawman and bounty. Fisher man.
“I thought there were a lot of immigrants in the West really, so that was the feeling of the coming light,” he said of bringing up the concept. “And I wanted someone very American to be the antagonist and the worthy antagonist, obviously not just a villain. But then I borrowed the plot of ‘The Iliad,’ and that’s one of the things I’ve been telling people, ‘Don’t worry about the story, we know it works, it was great’ 2,700 years ago.” But it’s about a man of evil political influence who hires a mercenary to go find his supposedly kidnapped wife, but that doesn’t happen. Well, Homer beat me, but I doubt he will sue me.”
To portray the trustworthy Sergeant Poe, a black soldier in the 1890s, Burke said he had to be confident.
“In 1897,” he said, “to be an African American male, in the midst of all these characters, you must really know yourself.” “You can’t call that person, and especially with the beautiful poetry that Walter Hill was writing from, you have to know you or you’ll think that way and it really isn’t.”
Dead for a Dollar, starring Rachel Brosnahan and Hamish Linklater, will be released in theaters September 30.
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