How Western Locations Became Characters The Hollywood Reporter

From the colorfully painted Redwood City to the monochromatic all-white Maysville, the mandate for Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall was to have “a really strong identity for each of the different towns,” says production designer Martin Whist, who collaborated with cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. and others on the production team to give the Western a unique visual language. “We all really worked together closely in order to make each particular town sing its own song. … It took a lot of teamwork, and we just had such a great team.”

The Netflix film — featuring an ensemble cast that includes Jonathan Majors, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz, Delroy Lindo, Regina King and Idris Elba — was lensed at locations in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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The fictional Redwood City, the most colorful of the towns in the film, was created at Cerro Pelon Ranch, then owned by designer Tom Ford. “Jeymes was very clear that he wanted it not to be a dusty old Western town,” says Whist. “He wanted color. … He wanted an original town and original look.”

Whist notes that it took some “finesse” to find Redwood City’s color palette. “If you have a strong, saturated color and it’s bright on a Western scenario, it just looks completely wrong,” he says. “But if it’s crushed down and tinted down, and it’s a deeper chromatic level of the color itself, then it settles in and has some soul to it.”

Maysville (lensed at Eaves Ranch, a filming location for decades, including 1969’s Easy Rider) was scripted as a white town, meaning all its residents were white. “I was like, ‘Well, we should just make this town white,’ ” Whist remembers suggesting to Samuel. “Everything white. All the buildings, white. All the horses, white. The ground, white. The bank, white. And he looked at me and just laughed. And he was like, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ “

The team even identified a pumice stone that they used to cover the ground. “[We] just brought in truckloads of this crushed white stone,” Whist says.

In contrast, there was Douglastown (lensed at San Cristobal Ranch), which was designed to be a “rough, really dark” outlaw town. “It was shot at night, and it was not about color. It’s about creating another dramatic identity for the town. And this one was just rough and tumble and muddy and wet with lots of fire out on the exterior. Mihai lit it up gorgeous.”

Malaimare recalls the first conversations he had with Samuel about the visual style. They decided early on that the format would be widescreen anamorphic, and he cites the director’s strong desire to play with color saturation. “That was the No. 1 thing; we all knew that color saturation [was] good for the project,” he says. “And then we started building, little by little, the different looks for each town.”

For camera movement, the DP relates, it was a “classical approach” using the modern tools at their disposal. “We forced ourselves to stay on the dolly and to come up with really interesting moves, using modern tools like a cablecam or all sorts of other interesting lenses,” he adds. “We were trying to figure out how to do something and make it look really new and fresh — but also pay tribute to the genre.”

This story first appeared in the Nov. 10 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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