“Guns Go Bang:” Director/Composer Jeymes Samuel Breaks the Rules in Netflix’s ‘The Harder They Fall’

Keeping up with the ridiculously talented, infectiously enthusiastic Jeymes Samuel in an interview is like trying to grasp mercury with a pair of chopsticks. In discussing how the multi-hyphenate of multi-hyphenates (Samuel produced, directed, wrote the screenplay, the songs, and composed the score for The Harder They Fall) used modern music to inform the style and substance of his fabulous addition to the Western genre, Samuels would go from describing his ideas, to singing lyrics, and to humming the sounds of various instruments.

Both the score and the song “Guns Go Bang” (written and recorded with Jay-Z and Kid Cudi) from the film are shortlisted as finalists by the Academy for the possibility of being nominated for Oscars. I have to tell you — it would be worth it to see Samuels win either statue, not just because both the song and score are so great, but also to hear Samuel deliver the speech. There are times in life when you meet someone so full of personality and good cheer (and in Samuel’s case, also prodigious talent) that you can’t possibly help but root for them.

I know after speaking with him, I walked away as a charter member of the Jeymes Samuel fan club. I have the distinct sense that our numbers are going to grow with alacrity over the next several years. Samuel is one of a kind.

And you can see that below in a new roundtable discussion between Samuel, Jay Z, and producer James Lassiter.

Awards Daily: Before making The Harder They Fall, your only credit as a director was They Die By Dawn from 2013, which was not widely seen. Now, eight years later, here you are with a big budget, huge stars, and a massive streaming network behind your film. How did you get from They Die By Dawn to The Harder They Fall?

Jeymes Samuel: Well first, They Die By Dawn is a short film, it’s not a feature, For whatever reason on IMDb it’s described as a ‘film,” so people think that The Harder They Fall is my second movie, but it’s not, it’s my first. I didn’t make They Die By Dawn to be released commercially. I figured if I made it to be released commercially, I wouldn’t have been able to afford it because I self-funded it. The SAG fees would have been different, just a non-commercial thing to be released like on YouTube, I ended up releasing it on Tidal.  I actually shot the film in 2012, ten years ago. I wrote it in 2011. I conceived The Harder They Fall fifteen years ago, so it took me a good ten years to make The Harder They Fall, but it didn’t seem like it, David. I love the space in-between where you have conception, then creation. And what turns everyone off in life, whatever it is, is the journey in between, they think the journey is too hard.

I come from the hood in the UK.  I love the space in between, it’s the adventure of getting it done. So what if you fail, only a small percentage of people are successful, but at least the journey towards it is a really awesome thing, and that’s what I was doing putting The Harder They Fall together. I knew that I had to make almost like a proof of concept, not to investors or whatever but just to the public through South by Southwest and all these film festivals, and do these screenings with They Die By Dawn just to show people that we existed in that space and time. A lot of people that used to argue with me about the nonexistence of black cowboys were black people. But then when you see They Die By Dawn with Erykah Badu, Michael K. Williams, Giancarlo Esposito, Nate Parker, Bokeem Woodbine, Isaiah Washington, Roger Guenveur Smith, Harry Lennix, Rosario Dawson, you see all these people, you can’t help but just stand back and take note. Hey, I wanna see that film. Then I wrote a whole other script but using some historical characters that really existed which is The Harder They Fall and we got it done. 

Awards Daily: Having made two Westerns now, I assume this is a genre you feel really attached to.

Jeymes Samuel: I am attached to the genre. There’s a Nat Love in They Die By Dawn, there’s a Nat Love but the story is totally different. As far as film is concerned they are unrelated, but just the ethos. I love the old west, I love the cowboy movie, even though the reason why people think they don’t like cowboy movies, or why some of them think they don’t like Westerns – even though we had tens of millions of views on Netflix for The Harder They Fall –  is because they have been malnourished in the depiction of what is the old west. If you imagine there exists an entire genre, think of how Star Wars revolutionized sci-fi, it’s a space opera, it’s a Western. But look at the huge role Princess Leia plays. She starts the entire story. She faces off Peter Cushing and Darth Vader and does not flinch. Grand Moff Tarkin…her first words “I should have known, I could smell your foul stench” who is this lady?

But yet, in Westerns there’s no such character. Imagine a whole genre exists where they just blanketly ignored the dominance of women. Even in Joan Crawford’s Johnny Guitar, it’s still called Johnny Guitar. [Laughs] Really? It’s a Joan Crawford movie. So, that’s what we felt is the reason people say they don’t like Westerns, because a Western literally just means the time and place it’s set in. You like stories don’t you? So it isn’t that they don’t like Westerns, they were just malnourished. We wanted to show that black people existed, here are real characters, and women of substance. Women have been at the forefront of every single thing that’s happened in life since the beginning of mankind because they gave birth to us. There is no what came first, the chicken or the egg, you know the answer to that question…the woman. And then everything comes after. It was important to me to continue that ethos and to revisit the old west again. I love Westerns. I just want to broaden the scope of  them as much as possible.

Awards Daily: On The Harder They Fall, you produced, directed, wrote the screenplay, composed the score and wrote some of the songs, how did you keep all those balls in the air?

Jeymes Samuel: That is the way that I have always worked. I probably produced the entire soundtrack, I’ve composed the score I think but for me David, it’s like it’s all one continuous thought. So I can start on a score while I’m writing the script. I’ve always thought composers come on to movies too late. Composers are hired when the movie is shot, in post a lot of times – that’s too late. A composer will inform the script, and the director. A composer will inform where you place the camera. Composers are as close to the film, as close as the filmmaker, as you can get. If the director understands melodies he will view where he puts the camera differently if they speak to the composer at the script stage. I don’t believe a composer should be given this whole finished painting to compose to, they should start composing on the script stage. And every composer would probably agree they come on late, but they have so much more to give. And so for me, I have to start when I’m writing. (Hums and sings) ok that’s a motif (lalalalalala) and I’ll start writing out the notes. The writing, the directing, the score, It’s just one complete thought.

Awards Daily: I spoke to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross about scoring Watchmen for HBO, and they told me that they started composing the score based on ideas they got from the script. They wanted to send the music over to the production to see if they were on the right track. Of course, where you are concerned, you are the track because you compose the music and direct.

Jeymes Samuel:  Yeah absolutely. Say, if we look at the Watchmen, Watchmen was a celebrated graphic novel, so a composer – he would be able to absorb that whole graphic novel and go “look, just listen to this” and that would dictate how you made the camera move because the camera is the story teller, the camera is the narrator of the movie. A movie doesn’t work without a camera, right? So, the camera is the narrator of the movie to the audience. And you don’t want your camera to just point and shoot – or in this day and age press record – you want the camera to swim and tell the audience the story in the best possible way. Imagine how much more the camera could play if the composer  knew the motifs beforehand. How much more the camera can swim if they have a melody like Superman’s dundada dadadadadada. If he had that beforehand, Richard Donner could play even more. By the time I’ve started on the script I’ve already got the motifs and the score and all of the songs pretty much written and worked up. I think it’s one continuous stream of consciousness. 

Awards Daily: In doing my research on you for this interview, I discovered that Seal is your brother. He’s on the soundtrack singing the hell out of the song ‘Ain’t No Better Love.’ It’s my favorite song of his in years.

Jeymes Samuel: That particular song is the first song I have ever written and produced for my brother. He’s my brother! We’re like in the house together and people are always like, would you work with your brother? That particular song, it’s very rare I hear him sing in that register, and with that power…to attack a track like a gangster (singing) but because he’s my brother, I know his other skill sets, his capabilities. Like, he’s not the crooner people make him out to be. So I’m going to give them Seal, but in this bag with this sound. With regards to my background, there were always instruments and cameras in the house. My mom bought me a super-8 camera when I was seven years old. She bought me a Bolex 60mm when I was thirteen and in between that there were always instruments in the house – on top of the guitar I stole from school that never did go back [Laughs] – so  I was always shooting stuff and putting music to it. I’ve never done anything else.

When I was sixteen I was directing music videos and short films and I joined the London filmmakers co-op and then I learned to edit on a Steenbeck and record sound on Allegro, and shoot film on my Bolex. And then I’d be composing music behind it. So it’s not that really I got into film per se, I just never stopped doing what I was doing naturally. That was my background, immensely musical and immensely filmmaking. My mom taught me everything I know about film. She’d sit me down and teach me about David Lean, Fellini, Bergman – Wild Strawberries is still one of my favorite films. I had projectors up at home and I would host Film Noir Sundays. I’d put on “Double Indemnity” or I’d put on Charles Laughton’s only directorial – I wouldn’t even call it effort, that movie is one of the greatest film noirs of all time – Night of the Hunter…it got panned by the critics and he never made another film…crazy…but I showed them Night of the Hunter and we’d be breaking it down, so it’s almost like I turned that entire area that I lived in into a film community.

Awards Daily: There have been other Westerns in recent years, particularly the two Tarantino movies (Django Unchained and Hard Eight) that used modern music in an anachronistic fashion on film. Clearly, you gave no pause to using modern songs in your film.

Jeymes Samuel:  I’ve always said that if you watch, say, Rio Bravo with Ricky Nelson, John Wayne, Dean Martin. You know when Dean Martin appears in the film, you know there’s gonna be some songs coming up. I always use “Rio Bravo” as an example. Dean Martin in the jail sings a song called “My Rifle, My Pony, and Me” (sings) and John Wayne’s staring at the cup and just looking at them “there goes Dean, there goes Dean right there.” But Jesse James or Frank James never heard any genre of music like “my rifle, my pony, and me”. Well, if you look at the theme of Rawhide, (sings) Wild Bill Hickok never heard any music like that. Let’s not even go to Italy yet, let’s not even go to Ennio Morricone, we can take 3:10 to Yuma (sings) the original 3:10 to Yuma Glenn Ford…that wasn’t cowboy music. Westerns have always had modern music in them. People just don’t think of it that way. 

Awards Daily: That’s a great point. That twangy guitar that Morricone used in Leone’s films is almost like surf music.

Jeyemes Samuel: Billy the Kid not only never even heard of electric guitar, he probably never heard of electricity. [Laughs] Think about it. You weren’t walking down the street in the old west and hearing “dadada” (singing), it was always modern music. So for me, what I wanted to do, I wanted to give The Harder They Fall it’s own signature. Not just make it hip-hop but give it it’s own suit, something that roots it in – not the now – but just in the different, what I call the new west. So I was experimenting with all these different sounds and I came across old school reggae, which is as cinematic as you can possibly get. But a person that knows reggae  isn’t necessarily working in Hollywood. But just the baselines and the (singing) I thought what happens if you cross that with an orchestra? So I’d take my instruments and I’d be (hums) when Trudy Smith would talk “clearly you don’t know me” (hums) and then you put the strings on (hums). I have never had this before in cinema, but it belongs, David, it belongs, it belongs, it belongs. You have the two worlds who never met, and then the Lord gave the world Jeymes Samuel. [Laughs]