Director Jimmy Hayward on "Jonah Hex"

(Jimmy Hayward): Really, directing, to me, is re-articulating what you want in many many different ways to different types of people.  Talking to your DP is one thing, talking to someone as intelligent and perceptive and sensitive as Josh (Brolin), you know, who's a really smart guy, is one thing.  Obviously, John Malkovich has one way of working, who's the sweetest, nicest guy in the world.  Josh has another, Megan (Fox) has another.  They're all different personalities.  And then your technical departments are all different types of people too.  You've got teams of illustrators to deal with; you've gotta be able to talk to them like a illustrator.  Editorially you've gotta talk another different way.  And so it's really just expressing what you want over and over again in all of these different, re-articulated ways.

MakingOf: How did you get involved with this project?

(JH): I was a big fan of "Jonah Hex" when I was a kid, and it's something that I never thought I'd see made into a film.  When I read about Neveldeen and Taylor, and Mark O'Brien were involved in the movie I was like 'Damn I wish I was working on that movie.  Those lucky guys.'  And I found out Lazar was doing it, and so when those guys jumped off the picture and I knew that they were looking for a director I ran over to Andrews office and I was like 'I gotta do this movie.'  And he was like 'I don't know.'  And he was very involved with Josh Brolin at the time and 'I don't know, you kind of just did a movie with dancing elephants.  It was a big hit, but I don't know dude.' 

So I wrote Josh Brolin an email and I just talked about the character and I talked about what I'd do with the movie if I got it.  So the next day my phone rang and I was like 'Hello,' and he was like 'Horton Hears a Who huh?'  It was Josh on the phone and we talked for an hour and I think he was really impressed with what I said in the email.  So I went and met him at William Morris, when it was still William Morris, and we talked for hours, and he wound up going to bat for me to do this picture.  We became fast friends and really had the same idea about what we wanted to do with the picture.

MO: What was the production like?

(JH): It was tricky finding train tracks that would support what we wanted to do, and blow stuff up, and, you know, we turned a city park in New Orleans into a Mexican border town.  It'd hard to find sand dunes...in the opening sequence of the movie...we trucked in and moved tons of sand around, and built military roads through swamps, and, it was pretty tricky.  Louisiana just worked out and it was really great, and they were really great to us.  And they have great crews there, so we were really stoked.

MO: Were there any behind the scenes moments that you'll never forget after production?

(JH): Oh yeah, many many many.  You know, when you've got horses, and guns, and stunts, and you're blowing stuff up...heavy makeup, long hours on the chair...you're just like, there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong.  I mean, the opening town that Jonah rides into dragging the three bodies into...that was our last day of shooting in Louisiana, and we burned the entire town down.  We blew up the one building, and in caught the other buildings on fire, and we had a major fire on our hands, which we shot, all of it.  I was like 'keep rolling, keep rolling.'  And Mitch, our DP, was running around reloading cameras, and you know, stuff happens.  We blew up a train obviously, I mean, all of this really spectacular stuff.

MO: How was that transition for you as a filmmaker coming off of working on primarily animated?

(JH): It was a lot of fun.  Blowing stuff up is a lot more fun (laughs) I must admit.  And you know I'm a long time action fan, and you know, just a film fan and I've been studying films and filmmaking since I was a kid.  Shooting lots of stuff in skate videos, and you know, just all kinds of stuff.  It was a difficult transition go go from...it's managing large groups of people and visual storytelling.  It's just a different process and a new process.  So I wasn't new to shooting, but I was new to shooting with that much power.

MO: How do you begin to break that down, or choreograph these huge action sequences? 

(JH): Storyboards.  You plan everything out, just storyboard everything.  And then you take those storyboards to your creative leases and you say 'How would you approach this?, How are we going to do this from a technical standpoint?'  Go to Tom Meyer, the production designer, you know, 'What do we do, do we build our own train?'  So we wound up, for instance, buying train trucks in Chicago, and having them shipped down to Louisiana.  We built our own train that we could shoot in, and move a 50-foot techno crane around on, and then ultimately explode into a million pieces.

So, you know, every step of the way our horse guy Rusty would tell me what we could and couldn't do when I had to have guys running around next to a train on horses and jump from one to the other.  We'd build special platforms.  Or, you know, how to get a pursuit arm vehicle with a 30-foot arm on it with a camera on it to shoot all of those action sequences. 

We wound up planting and growing sugar cane in a field for five months next to the train tracks, and then cutting roads into it because the train could only go ten miles an hour and I wanted it to look like it was going 60 miles an hour.  And there's an old animation trick, parallaxing.  So we would cut a five foot row of sugar cane in, so we would have the pursuit vehicle driving along next to the train and there would be all of this sugar cane whipping by in the foreground and voila it looks like it's going fast.  That train only ever went ten miles an hour.  I know.  I dove off of it.  Eight times.

<end>