The Next Classic Buddy Film
Director/star Ed Harris and author Robert B. Parker give us an inside look at Appaloosa.
Categories: Westerns
By: Henry Cabot Beck 09/01/2008
Steel-eyed, sober, often grim and frequently dangerous, Ed Harris has carved a niche for himself portraying characters who can be flawed or misdirected.
Whether he’s playing an earnest astronaut (John Glenn in The Right Stuff) or a scarred gangster (A History of Violence), his parts are rarely less than formidable.
It’s no surprise that Harris is drawn to Westerns. He’s narrated documentaries on Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and on director Budd Boetticher. What is surprising is that prior to Appaloosa, out in theaters October 3, he’s only acted in one, a made-for-TV Zane Grey oater Riders of the Purple Sage, which co-starred his wife Amy Madigan, and for which he received a Screen Actors Guild acting nomination. In fact, Harris has been nominated for Oscars four times, and he has taken home one Golden Globe out of a possible five.
Appaloosa is Harris’s baby. He found the book, secured permission from novelist Robert B. Parker to make the film, cowrote the screenplay and directed the film. His only other director’s credit came from his biographical portrait of abstract impressionist painter Jackson Pollock a.k.a. “Jack the Dripper,” who died in 1956. “It’s true, Pollock had a bit of the cowboy in him,” says Harris, “at least in terms of his self image.” And for an artist, or a cowpoke, image is everything.
The character Harris plays in Appaloosa is anything but your average saddle tramp. Virgil Cole is a town tamer, a man hired to chase out undesirables or fix unfixable messes, usually by any means necessary.
Like Oates, the amoral mercenary Harris played in 1983’s Under Fire, Cole is also a hired killer, but Cole has a code and a cause. He believes in the law. With his best friend Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) in tow, he stands for a special kind of rough justice in a mythical West—the same West found in the stories written by Elmore Leonard. The movie was even shot on the same New Mexico set as the recent remake of Leonard’s 3:10 To Yuma.
Ed Harris: We used the same town as 3:10, but we totally redid it. You’d never know from that film where you were—everything was all close ups; you never got a sense of the country really or where they were. One of the things that I like about Appaloosa is, even though it’s an hour and 47 minutes, it takes its time when it needs to and you get a real sense of where you are, the town and the people in it....
It’s early 1880s, in the Southwest, and it’s definitely post-Civil War. I think Parker refers to some of the weapons that these guys were using that were at least after 1873, the Winchester ’73. In terms of the Indian situation, most of the Apaches were on the San Carlos Reservation by 1882, so you figure [the timing is] around there. At least in my mind. I don’t guess he ever does mention the date in the novel.
I think that Parker’s book definitely leans toward a more kind of classic-oriented story in the sense that it is a bit timeless and what’s going on with these people. It happens to be in the West; it happens to be around 1880. But in terms of the human drama of it all, it could be any time really. It’s about love, relationships, loyalty, greed, friendships, all that stuff.
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great movie