Kurt Russell’s spiritual sequel to ‘Tombstone’: “A movie that needed to be made”
Not every actor is given the chance to keep performing well into their old age; stars of yesteryear routinely fade away once they reach retirement age, but Kurt Russell has somehow managed to escape that fate.
If anything, since turning 60, the former child star has appeared in everything from chart-busting hits like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 to auteur-driven passion projects like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, even playing jolly old Santa Claus twice.
One of the more interesting entries in Mr Goldie Hawn’s late-stage career hit theatres in 2015 in the form of the western Bone Tomahawk with a horror twist. Russell plays Sheriff Franklin Hunt, who, along with a team of brave souls from his small town, embarks on a mission to rescue three people taken hostage by a tribe of cannibals. It doesn’t hold back on the violence and gore, with one scene in particular leaving audiences scarred for life.
The feature-length debut of director S Craig Zahler, the production process behind Bone Tomahawk was a troubled one, but its leading man was desperate to see it through to the end, telling Esquire, “It’s just one of those little indie movies that they were going to try to put together. They were coming to me, and I told Craig…that I liked it and I wanted to talk to him about what he wanted to do. So at some point we did. We started the process of making the movie, which got close a couple of times and then fell down and got close and fell down. You know, like these little movies go through. I had never done one of these independent-type pictures before.”
Perhaps one of the reasons why Russell was so keen was that the film reminded him of one of his old appearances as a famous lawman in the 1993 movie Tombstone, playing the legendary Wyatt Earp. The movie, which famously went up against a Kevin Costner film about a similar subject, isn’t anywhere near as bloody as its modern counterpart; however, Russell felt as if there was a connection between the two that ran deeper than their Wild West setting.
In that same interview, the star recalled how Tombstone also needed his help to secure funding. Much like with Bone Tomahawk, he read the script and was convinced that the end product would not only be great, but that he needed to be involved, calling it “a complete approach to the western that I had never really read before… It was a movie that needed to be made, and I would love to do it”.
Even after getting the project greenlit, Russell still had to fight to get it over the line, claiming that he was the one who did most of the organising, and not credited director George P Cosmatos.
Luckily, both Tombstone and Bone Tomahawk received rave reviews and are now bona fide cult classics within the western genre, which probably wouldn’t have existed had Russell not taken a chance and kept at it, so nice work, cowboy!
