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What were the advantages of remaking a good movie that isn’t really held up as a true classic and isn’t really known by a lot of audiences today?

“I think that the word remake has come to mean one thing and I think it's very different in the case of films like ours, which is that there's this very cynical kind of remake in Hollywood where you have a brand of a toy or a TV show from the '70's or whatever it is and you take some modern stars and 70 million dollars and you throw it all together and you have asses in seats because everyone recognizes the brand.

With 3:10 to Yuma your point is that there's probably one percent of one percent of America is even aware of the title. So we weren't getting any kind of innate cynical advantage, which is usually implied when you're saying remake. Like, 'Oh, it's easy work. Your story's laid out for you and there's instant appeal with everyone in America.'

We have a genre that no studio believes anyone wants to see anymore. We have a story no one's ever heard of before, so that in a sense… No one knew who starred in the original so in a way we really had our work cut out for us. I think the example I'd use is I do think the original film is great. I do think though that there's a chance sometimes to remake, when movies aren't legendary or haven't become iconographic, there is the chance, you know how many Hamlets have been made? How many MacBeths have been made? We have in this country also kind of really wonderful mythic timeless texts and there are times where it might be interesting to bring a contemporary point of view to one of these stories, instead of half the time what Hollywood does is remake the movie from the side, which is keep all the story elements but deny that you're just doing a mirror of the original film.

Why not just be honest about it and do that text again? And that's exactly what we kind of just thought we'd do.”

The golden age of the Western ended a while ago so what was your selling point when you went and pitched this to studios?

“We lost. We lost. No one wanted to make it. The other thing I think is a real selling point of the film, and I do think there's an exhaustion factor, is how many times are we going to see young stars of the day in spandex in front of a green screen with some flying background? If I can do it on my Xbox and I can do it on my PlayStation and I can see it every week running on HBO, I'm like, ‘Is it going to stay exciting?’ And is there something exciting about a bunch of men and women going out into the desert and making a film with their hands and their feet and the hooves and the reins? And the wheels and the guns and there are no green screens and there is no bologna and it wasn't shot in LA or in Pinewood or any of that. It's like we're out there. And when it's snowing, it's snowing in the movie.

There's something, I think, appealing about that, that we've lost in movies as they become more and more kind of results of a…digitized. And this is a very analogue film. I think there's a way that that could be very appealing.”