After all the nuance of exploring this historic phenomenon is among the central factors of the film, however in keeping with Wright, it’s additionally the nuance that scared Common Footage’ new administration after the studio was merged with PolyGram Filmed Leisure.
“There was a altering of the guard on the studio from the time that we shot the movie till the time it was completed,” Wright explains. “And the brand new gatekeepers didn’t fairly perceive the movie. I believe they have been scared. They have been afraid of it and never fairly understanding the way it was, for instance, {that a} Black man would discover himself combating on the aspect of the Confederacy, historical past be damned. There was a man named John [Noland], and he was a scout for Quantrill, who after all we present on his well-known raid into Lawrence, Kansas. So regardless of the historic accuracy and in addition the methods by which Ang framed it, they only couldn’t fairly get their heads round it.”
The image is definitely fairly slippery in its shift of perspective. Initially advised from the POV of Maguire’s Roedel, the son of a German immigrant who’s each too poor to personal a slave and maybe too ignorant to consider a motive to battle in a conflict past all his boyhood associates are doing it, the movie slowly watches Roedel’s self-awareness develop after spending a winter hunkered down in a makeshift bunker with Holt. Nevertheless, it additionally turns into about Holt’s personal self-actualization, notably as he outlives the person who ostensibly gave him freedom, in addition to his sense of debt to white males who would kill others over easy concepts—concepts like instructing abolition in a brand new schoolhouse. It even finds house to puncture the mythology round what was then the rising Western outlaw, represented by Jonathan Rhys Meyers as not-Jesse James.
“For me what was thrilling about that function was not that this was this freedman or soon-to-be-free man combating for the Confederacy,” explains Wright. “For me what was fascinating was that he was combating for his personal freedom and he was combating to emancipate himself, versus being emancipated by the Nice White Northern Savior, which is what we fairly often see in cinema.”
He continues, “It’s considered one of my favourite experiences engaged on a movie, and that had extra to do [with us] driving horses each day for six months. It was only a pleasure. But it surely’s additionally a efficiency that I’m very pleased with, and it’s one of many solely movies I believe you’ll see in your complete canon by which a Black character rides off into the sundown on the finish of a Civil Battle movie.”
The film certainly ends with Holt selecting to half methods together with his good friend on equal footing, and to additionally make sense of his personal life as he rides off to find what grew to become of his household in Texas. The complexity of that ending additionally has echoes to today, as many People proceed to revise the realities of the Civil Battle, and maybe a bit like a few of the white characters in Journey with the Satan, shudder at their kids being taught concepts in colleges that make them uncomfortable.
