True West

Director Antoine Fuqua on his remake of The Magnificent Seven, how to make it in Hollywood, and the way of the samurai.

- Busra Erkara

ANTOINE FUQUA ISN’T AFRAID OF A LITTLE GOOD OLD-FASHIONED CLOSE combat. Between Training Day, the now classic L.A. crime drama that earned Denzel Washington an Academy Award, and last year’s boxing thriller Southpaw with Jake Gyllenhaal, the veteran director has seen more blood, sweat, tears, gunshots and pyrotechnics than most paramedics. After getting his start directing music videos for Coolio, Stevie Wonder and Prince in the 1990's, Fuqua has since worked with everyone from Chow Yun-Fat (The Replacement Killers) and Bruce Willis (Tears of the Sun) to Danny Glover (Shooter) and Morgan Freeman (Olympus Has Fallen).

The filmmaker joined forces with Washington again for 2014’s underrated revenge fantasy The Equalizer. They teamed up once more in Fuqua’s most high-wattage project yet, The Magnificent Seven, a 21st-century western with gold-rush pathos. The film tells the story of an oppressed frontier town fighting for its independence with the help of a fearless bounty hunter (Washington) and six extraordinary gunmen—among them a lovable alcoholic (Chris Pratt), an axe-swinging dissident (Vincent D’Onofrio) and a pistol-duelling gambler with undiagnosed PTSD (Ethan Hawke).

The Magnificent Seven is a loose remake of the 1960 classic of the same name, which is an adaptation of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. What DNA do the films share?