This Christian Bale Western Took Three Decades To Be Made

Movies that take an extremely long time to be made — often due to being stuck in development hell — usually give us viewers a cause for concern. Just think of the still coming "Blade" reboot with Mahershala Ali, which has been in development since 2019. Over the last six years, the project had changed directors as frequently as underwear, not to mention the numerous rewrites the script underwent, and yet we got no closer to the film actually happening. That doesn't necessarily mean the flick will suck, of course. "Avatar: The Way of Water" (which took 12 years) and "Mad Max: Fury Road" (13 years) did deliver and obliterate the box office after all, so there's always hope.

The more intriguing thing when it comes to cinema is the stories that were shelved, abandoned, or not-yet-discovered before actually making it to the silver screen. I'm talking about screenplays that took many years or even several decades before they were turned into the films as we know them today. John Milius's "Apocalypse Now" script took 10 years until Francis Ford Coppola adapted it to the screen. Craig Borten wrote "Dallas Buyers Club" in 1992, and it was only 21 years later until his vision came alive, starring Matthew McConaughey and winning three Oscars out of six nominations.

In a way, that's kind of what happened to Scott Cooper's fourth film, "Hostiles," a somber and soul-searching Western, originally penned by the legendary screenwriter Donald E. Stewart, who co-wrote the classic Jack Ryan films, "The Hunt for Red October," "Patriot Games," and "Clear and Present Danger."

According to an interview that Cooper gave Deadline in 2018, after watching his first two films as a director ("Crazy Heart" and "Out of the Furnace"), Stewart's widow reached out to him to offer something quite special. Stewart had died in 1999, but he left behind an unseen story that was discovered by his wife when she stumbled upon it while packing things up before selling her house. It was the original manuscript for "Hostiles," which meant a lot to its author, according to his widow, and she thought that Cooper would be the perfect man to tell it on the big screen. The actor-director was honoured and completely intrigued by it. He said:

"What spoke to me was the kernel of an idea about a man who has been indoctrinated by the United States government from a very young age essentially to fight and to kill. Christian [Bale] and I discussed that perhaps he was a very young boy in a hornet's nest at Shiloh, the waning days of the Civil War and from that point on he has been fighting the Indian wars, all at the instruction of the American government. What struck me was this man with a deep-seated hatred was forced to escort one of his rivals, a dying Cheyenne chief. I set that from New Mexico to Montana. Over the course of this journey, these two men begin to gain a sense of understanding, healing, reconciliation and ultimately enlightenment.

He continued, "As I was working on the screenplay, we had this racial and cultural divide in America. I wanted to speak to that in the confines of an American Western."

If you've seen the film — which also stars Wes Studi, Rosamund Pike, Jesse Plemons, Scott Shepherd, Bill Camp, and many Native Americans in smaller roles — you know that Cooper skillfully delivered on his vision. "Hostiles" is beautifully tragic, filled with sorrow, regret, raw violence, and a roster of stellar performances (especially by Bale and Pike) that truly cut to the viewer's core. It's an emotionally heavy and stirring watch with deep contemplations about past mistakes, wrongs, and life and death, which might explain why it flopped at the box office back in 2017. Not a usual western by any means — although Cooper claimed that John Ford's "The Searchers" was a big inspiration he drew from, like many other directors before him — but certainly a slightly underrated one. If you're a fan of the genre, make sure to seek it out.