“It wasn’t, like: ‘How are we going to reflect society?’” Next thing I know …” He mimes trotting along on horseback, invisible reins in his hands. He wanted to see me and Chris riding on horses. He grew up watching them with his grandma. Why make the film now? “You’re putting too much on it, man!” Washington hoots. Still keen to hear how their Magnificent Seven relates to society today, I press the point. “I remember going to the movies and having that feeling – ‘I wanna be that guy.’ Unfortunately, that was the 1970s so it was usually drug dealers: ‘I’m gonna be a dope dealer like him!’” “Audiences like to know who they’re rooting for,” he says. “I’m just not sure exactly what that reflection looks like.” Washington has a stab. “Mirrors reflect.” He lets that comment hang in the air. Photograph: Sam Emerson/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. So where exactly are we?ĭenzel Washington and Chris Pratt in The Magnificent Seven. The film’s director, Antoine Fuqua, who coaxed Washington toward an Oscar-winning performance as a corrupt cop in Training Day, has said westerns “reflect where we are in the world”. With a cast list that offers a rebuke to conventional Hollywood casting (there’s even a woman among the seven heroes) and a conflict that pits poor against rich, the movie is in the tradition of westerns that comment on our times, such as Soldier Blue or The Wild Bunch. Except neither Washington nor Pratt seems especially keen to go on the record about any resonance the film might have in the wider world. A second Guardians movie is due next May.įor now, it’s all about The Magnificent Seven. Superstardom only descended, though, once his loosey-goosey charms were transposed to a blockbuster setting in Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World. Pratt made his name as a deliriously dopey member of the Parks and Recreation ensemble. His 37-year-old co-star – who is wearing jeans and a thin suede jacket, and sporting a sketchy beard – carries his fame more lightly. Those aren’t ordinary eyes: they’re the eyes of all the indomitable men he’s played, from Steve Biko to Malcolm X, the boxer Ruben Carter in The Hurricane to the drug lord Frank Lucas in American Gangster. When he peers straight at you, there’s a crackle of electricity in the air. He may be dressed in a baggy, grey T-shirt and jogging bottoms but his magnetism is undimmed. Seated at a table in a hotel room, the actors appear somewhat less than magnificent. In the street, their faces loom menacingly out of the posters for the remake of The Magnificent Seven, in which an ethnically diverse cast of outlaws and miscreants defend oppressed townsfolk from a brutal tyrant. Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt are the last men standing in this tumbleweed town. The film festival wound down the previous evening, and now the thoroughfare between the beach and the cinemas is deserted except for construction workers in threes and fours dismantling the decorations. I t is mid-afternoon and the Venice Lido is a ghost town baking in the sun.
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