Pratt’s ‘freedom’ a challenge – Movie star plays new hand, choose ‘Magnificent 7’

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TORONTO, Sept 23, (Agencies): The offer to star in Antoine Fuqua’s “The Magnificent Seven” came to Chris Pratt while he was on a hunting trip with friends, listening to an audio book of Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove.” Having recently learned some card tricks of his own, the part — a gun-slinging card sharp — felt like kismet.

“All of the signs in my life pointed me toward doing this movie,” Pratt says. “It’s like when you get dealt a hand that you don’t even throw a single card back. You’re like: That’s the hand I’m going to play.”

Off of the success of “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Jurassic World,” Pratt is now playing a much different game, with some enviable cards. Few actors have ever been more immediately, more head-spinningly catapulted to stardom as Pratt did when the collective $2.9 billion in global box office of “Guardians,” “Jurassic World” and “The Lego Movie” drove him to the top of the A-list.

“The Magnificent Seven,” a remake of the 1960 original (which itself was a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai”) was the first thing Pratt decided to do. “I actually said no to a lot of things,” he says. “This was the first thing I said yes to.”

The film, which opens Friday, represents the first phase of Pratt’s new reality as a movie star with the power to pick and choose. It’s still a somewhat novel experience for the 37-year-old Pratt, whose first decade in the movie business was as a comic character actor, most recognizable as the lovable Andy Dwyer on “Parks and Recreation.”

“This was the first chapter in a whole new book that was so vastly different from the first book,” says Pratt. “My choice of yes or no was on an audition. Do you want to go out for this? Yes or no. No one had offered me a part ever, so I would just go out for everything.”

His challenge now, he says, is to use his newfound freedom wisely.

“I became someone that a studio could at least partially build a movie around,” Pratt says. “It’s a good thing but it’s also a bad thing because you get offered all kinds of movies that you’re definitely not right for. You could potentially be responsible for getting a bunch of bad movies made.”

“If it was me on my own, I would have screwed it up,” he adds. “I rely on people I really trust.”

Naturally, there are some big-budget sequels on the horizon. He has already shot “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” due out next year, and he’ll be back for another “Jurassic World” film, where J.A. Boyona is set to take over directing. But more immediately, Pratt stars in the upcoming sci-fi thriller-romance “Passengers” alongside Jennifer Lawrence. They play space travelers woken from hibernation 90 years too early.

“Chris is a guy who’s trying harder. I think he’s focused. He’s happy to be there,” says Fuqua. “He’s physical, he has charm and he has a lot of depth that no one’s even scratched yet. I know he’s doing a lot of films now that will probably take him deeper. You can tell that’s where he wants to go.”

But Pratt is also devoting less of himself to his career, now that it’s been established. Pratt, who has a 4-year-old with his wife, Anna Farris, says he’s made the conscious decision to not do back-to-back movies. He’s aiming to make movies that are both good and commercial.

“I don’t really have the time or the luxury to say: Do one for them and one for me,” Pratt says. “The one that I do for them also has to be for me because the one that I do for me is really not making a movie and staying home with my family.”

In “Magnificent Seven,” Pratt slides into the role carved out earlier by Steve McQueen, or if you go back to “Seven Samurai,” Toshiro Mifune — the playful, hard-drinking, reckless one of the bunch. Though the film has received weak reviews from critics, Pratt was singled out by Variety for having the movie’s “most combustible star quality.”

That he’s now a full blown movie star may have changed Pratt’s life, but his appeal remains largely because it hasn’t seemed to change him much.

“To be clear, I’ve always been a happy person,” says Pratt. “I feel like that’s a skill more than a result of certain circumstances in your life. I think if you can be happy with nothing, you can be happy with everything. But if you can’t be happy with nothing, everything isn’t going to do it for you.”

Last year’s death of “Titanic” composer James Horner in a small-plane crash shocked and saddened many of his colleagues, including director Antoine Fuqua, who had recently finished “Southpaw” with the two-time Oscar winner, and had planned to do “The Magnificent Seven” with him.

So a few weeks after the tragedy, when Horner’s longtime musical collaborator Simon Franglen showed up on the film’s Louisiana set with “a gift from James,” the director was stunned as he found himself listening to 15 minutes of music that the composer had already written for the film, even before shooting started.

“I was overwhelmed,” Fuqua confesses. “It took me a while to get it together, it was just so beautiful and so powerful. I called my sound guy and said, ‘Get the biggest speakers you can and put them on the set right now.’ I walked out and played it for my crew. People clapped and cheered, and some had tears in their eyes. That music inspired us to push forward.”

Horner, it turns out, had so much work lined up that he decided to start earlier than usual on “Magnificent Seven,” based on just a reading of the script. (Other films on his list: “The Great Wall,” “Hacksaw Ridge,” and James Cameron’s “Avatar” sequels.) After Horner died, Franglen — a Grammy-winning producer who worked for two decades as Horner’s synthesizer programmer, arranger, and score producer — took the composer’s piano demos, done only weeks before, and, along with recordist/mixer/composer Simon Rhodes, developed them into a suite, which he recorded for Fuqua.

“There were several themes, a theme for the town, one for the cowboys, and so on,” Franglen explains. “It was about getting a style going, to open a discussion with Antoine.”

Fuqua, and then MGM, gave the go-ahead to proceed with a full score based on Horner’s themes. Franglen reassembled Horner’s team: Rhodes, orchestrator/conductor J.A.C. Redford, and music editors Joe E. Rand and Jim Henrikson.

“I know that you can still hear James in the score. People in the orchestra who had played his scores for 30 years said it felt right.

Simon Franglen

“James brought together a group of people that not only worked well together but also liked each other,” Redford says. “We talked about this project and how great it would be to somehow make this James’ final score.”

Creating the necessary 107 minutes of music, however, took months. Franglen supervised the entire process, writing new material as needed and adapting Horner’s original material to fit scenes wherever possible. (The final credit reads “music by James Horner and Simon Franglen.” Rhodes receives an “additional music” credit.)

Guitarist George Doering and ethnic-woodwind player Tony Hinnigan — two Horner regulars whose colorful work was featured in “The 33,” one of Horner’s final 2015 scores — contributed their unique sounds. A trio of singers added wordless vocals for especially wrenching moments, another Horner trademark. Franglen tortured two banjos to create an unnerving sound for the villain (played by Peter Sarsgaard).

But the bulk of the score — often muscular, ultimately heroic — was played by an 80-piece Hollywood orchestra, many of whom had played on previous Horner scores, including “Titanic” and “Avatar.”

It was impossible to ignore Elmer Bernstein’s iconic “Magnificent Seven” theme from the 1960 original, so it makes an appearance at the end of the film.

“That was tricky for Simon, and for all of us,” Fuqua says.

Notes Franglen, “It makes a statement, and it’s appropriate where it is.”

Franglen adds that the most important thing to Horner was “the sense of music being the soul of the film. I know that you can still hear James in the score. People in the orchestra who had played his scores for 30 years said it felt right. Everybody came to this from a sense of love for James and what he’d done for film music.”

Adds Redford, “James was a composer with a unique voice — one that could be applied to dozens of different films and still bring heart and beauty to those scores.”

Fuqua, who credits Horner’s support for his making the film in the first place, dedicated the movie to the late composer. “It was an unlikely friendship,” he concedes. “We were like the odd couple: I’m kind of aggressive and he was this quiet intellectual guy. He still saw movies with the eyes of a kid. I loved the guy. was a great loss. But he can live on through the music.”

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