The Director of FIRST REFORMED is Writing a Western For Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe Called NINE MEN FROM NOW

If you’re a fan of westerns you might be happy to learn that First Reformed director Paul Schrader is writing a western called Nine Men From Now. He’s writing this film for Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe.

The idea of Hawke and Dafoe starring in a western together is enough to get me excited! The film is most likely going to be a remake of the 1956 John Wayne-produced film Seven Men From Now, and here’s the synopsis for that:

Former sheriff Ben Stride, haunted by the loss of his wife in a Wells Fargo robbery, hunts for the seven men responsible for her death – along the way encountering a couple heading west for California, and an outlaw he once arrested.

Schrader obviously wanted to add a couple more people for the sheriff to kill in his version of the story. Schrader is a big fan of the original film and in a previous 2000 article with Film Comment, the filmmaker wrote:

“Seven Men from Now is, for me, the quintessential Western not because it is typical, but because it is emblematic. [Director Budd] Boetticher was deeply invested in the symbolic hero, as epitomized by the bullfighter The director was, for a time, a bullfighter himself. He saw his protagonists as matadors: alone in the hot sun, figures of grace and style surrounded by noise and danger.”

He also previously talked about the project in an interview with Deadline, but at the time he didn’t give away the name of the film:

“I have a project I’m working on for both Ethan and Willem [Dafoe], and one character is like Randolph Scott, the righteous lawman, and the other character is the slinky antagonist, the weasel. And so I was thinking, Ethan and Willem have both played both. They’ve both been an upright, they’ve both been weasels. So, which one should play which? Then I realized I could have it both ways, start Ethan out as the righteous one, Willem as the reprobate, and then at the beginning of the third act, flip ’em. So, all of a sudden, nobody in the story actually knows it, but all of a sudden they are playing the opposite roles. Now, I couldn’t do that with an actor who can only really play himself.”

This western could shape up to be a great film and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of it! Here’s the trailer for the original film, Seven Men From Now:

The hunt is on for seven men. Seven murderous rogues who robbed a Wells Fargo freight station of $20,000, killing a clerk in the process. Ex-lawman Ben Stride (RANDOLPH SCOTT) is the man determined to track down those seven men, for it was his beloved wife who was murdered during the heist.

Via: /film