The world lost a Hollywood legend last month when a plane crash took the life of composer James Horner, responsible for scoring films such as Titanic, Aliens, Apollo 13 and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, among many others. There’s some incredible news today, however, regarding what appears to be Horner’s very last score as director Antoine Fuqua revealed today to NPR that, in addition to scoring his latest, Southpaw, Horner secretly composed a score for Fuqua’s upcoming remake of The Magnificent Seven as well.
“I just found out a few days ago,” Fuqua says, “[Horner’s] team flew out here, to Baton Rouge, and they brought me all the music for ‘The Magnificent Seven’. He already wrote it for me based on the script. He did it all off the script because he wanted to surprise me. I thought it was a gift or something. And they all came out here and said, ‘Antoine, James wrote the music for ‘Magnificent Seven’ already and it’s just glorious.’”
Originally drafted by “True Detective” scribe Nic Pizzolatto (since rewritten by The Blind Side‘s John Lee Hancock), The Magnificent Seven will star Ethan Hawke, Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Vincent D’Onofrio, Haley Bennett, Byung Hun Lee, Jason Momoa, Matt Bomer, Peter Sarsgaard and Billy Slaughter in a remake the 1960 film directed by John Sturges that itself was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic Seven Samurai. Sturges’ version starred Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn and Robert Vaughn as a group of disparate gunmen who come together to protect a Mexican village from bandits led by Eli Wallach. The new film is said to feature a victimized mining town, taken over by a gold baron (Sarsgaard), rather than the Mexican village of the original.
“James was an incredible human being,” Fuqua recalls in the original interview, which you can listen to in the player below. “He was a filmmaker through and through. He was one of the most gentle people I’ve ever met. Even the way he spoke was very soft and thoughtful. He was magical. He had this childlike wonderment in his eyes, but he was an amazing artist, an amazing poet. I loved him and we became friends.”
The Magnificent Seven is slated for a January 13, 2017 release while Southpaw arrives in theaters this Friday, July 24.
