By Gill Pringle
Thanks to the internet and the rise of social media, today’s movies are held up to a potential and instant barrage of “published” (but in no way vetted) criticism. And this criticism is often not stitched to a film’s quality of acting, nor its narrative cohesion, nor the polish of its script – the hammer is now regularly dropped with bruising force based on a film’s level of diversity. Are there good roles for women? Is it filled with stereotypes? Is it environmentally and culturally sensitive? Are there enough actors of colour?
Even fantastic flights of movie fantasy – like the films of The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Joe Wright’s fairy tale reinvention, Pan, and even Star Wars – have been hauled into the court of public opinion and pronounced guilty. The term, “whitewashing”, has now entered the contemporary parlance, denoting a film (like recent whipping boy, Gods Of Egypt) that casts Anglo-type actors in roles that should logically be played by people of colour. And as the social media “outrage” continues (Marvel’s upcoming Doctor Strange has recently been slammed for casting Tilda Swinton in an Asian role from the comic books), many filmmakers have started to respond in the casting of their films.
An obvious example would appear to be Antoine Fuqua’s upcoming The Magnificent Seven, a remake of John Sturges’ classic 1960 western, which itself was a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece, Seven Samurai. With a few tweaks to the plotline of the original, this new version is set in the frontier town of Rose Creek, which is under the deadly control of a domineering industrialist. Living in fear, the desperate townspeople employ protection from seven outlaws, bounty hunters, gamblers, and hired guns. As they prepare the town for the violent showdown that they know is coming, these seven mercenaries find themselves fighting for more than money. Intriguingly, this magnificent seven is also admirably multicoloured, as played by a racially diverse crew of actors: Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D’Onofrio, Byung-hun Lee, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and Martin Sensmeier.
“I thought about it and I didn’t think about it,” Antoine Fuqua – himself an African-American – replies to FilmInk when asked if this multiracial casting was an intentional choice. “When we were discussing who the lead would be, we had a list of the usual guys. I was in a room with MGM and I said, ‘You know who would be amazing as the lead, like Yul Brynner in the original? Denzel Washington.’ The room went quiet. Then everybody said, ‘Would he do it? He hasn’t done a western.’ So I had lunch with Denzel and we talked about it. And then from that point, it just opened up the flood gates to be more diverse. I didn’t think about it as colour. I just thought that I needed a powerful lead, and colour was a conversation that came after.”
As well as Fuqua’s Training Day Oscar winner, there’s also a South Korean in Byung-hun Lee, a Mexican in Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and an indigenous Alaskan in Martin Sensmeier. “That casting came after Denzel signed on,” Fuqua reiterates. “It opened the flood gates to think that way. For me, it’s a different world that we live in, and to me, the movie is about terrorism. It’s going to take us all to fight terrorism, so that’s what this is. That group represents the world today. But I didn’t want it to explicitly be about race, because the conversation would happen anyway. I didn’t want to put it in the movie. I’ll just let people bring whatever they’re going to bring to the theatre and let them put their own interpretation on. There’s a scene where Denzel goes into a bar, and the whole room goes quiet. Naturally, some people will think that’s because it’s a black man walking into a bar. But my thought was that they look at all the seven like that because they’re all mean, tough men. When those guys walk into a room, it’s not about race. It’s that they’re afraid of these types of men, whether it’s a Native American walking in, or Denzel walking in, or Chris Pratt walking in. They get the same reaction. From everybody. I didn’t want to put it in the movie.”
Interestingly (and tellingly), there’s one piece of “whitewashing” in The Magnificent Seven that the internet’s social justice watchdogs probably won’t have an issue with. In the 1960 original, the film’s primary bad guy was a Mexican bandit played by Brooklyn-born Jew, Eli Wallach. In 2016, the villain role is now taken by the whiter-than-white Peter Sarsgaard, who plays the whiter-than-white Bartholomew Bogue, an evil businessman no less. Obviously, whitewashing is okay if you’re whitewashing the wrong kind of roles…
The Magnificent Seven is released in cinemas on September 29.
