Interview with David Leeds: Mr. Rainbow, right down to his name, is a hero of sixties and seventies counter culture with his championship of oppressed minorities and rejection of the establishment (the army). Did you choose the themes first or the genre? In other words, did you want to make a Western first, or was the Western simply a convenient genre to explore certain issues? You're right about the counter culture. In fact, in the script, Mr. Rainbow wore coloured glasses - basically hippy shades, which were actually rare, but historically authentic. It was from these that the character got the name, Mr. Rainbow (prismatic effects, etc.) The first moment I saw them on Chris I said forget it. They just looked weird, not cool or believable at all.
How did you do the vulture scene? They looked like real vultures and that they were actually attacking Walken. Indeed the vultures were real and they very much were trying to attack Chris. We had a 'vulture wrangler' who swore he had done this before, but after what we went through to shoot that scene, I doubt it. The vultures were tied with wire and staked down, just below ground level, or in some cases, we put rocks in front of the stakes. They were wild and frenzied, and were trying to get at Chris for real. Several times they broke away, but luckily none went right at his face. In retrospect, we were very lucky he wasn't hurt. Chris's attitude throughout the film, in scenes of physical distress and discomfort, was to dive right in.
While writing the script, I kept thinking of a young Clint Eastwood type. Then, I saw the Paul Mazursky film, Next Stop Greenwich Village (1976). There was a moment at the end of the film where Chris, who really had quite a minor, supporting role, walks into a bedroom and finds a buddy dead of suicide on the bed. He turns when someone else starts to come in, and says: 'Don't'. That moment and look, and affect was where I said, wait, that's the character. It was like a young Clint Eastwood on the surface, but with all the interior life, questioning, and angst that Chris has.
Christopher Walken has mentioned on various occasions that he doesn't like (i) horses (ii) the sun (iii) guns. Did he have any particular problems with any of these things while shooting the film? Chris was at that time, totally a creature of New York. I had in fact arranged for riding lessons for him in Central Park, and sent him a shootable version of the Colt-Patterson repeater, asking him to practise taking it apart and putting it together and had arranged a place where he could fire it. I also asked him to grow his hair a bit and not shave for a week before filming, and we'd figure out the best look when he got to location. Let's put it this way: the wrangler said he'd never been on a horse, the gun was unfired, and his hair was short, normal for him. It's fair to say that he didn't like horses, guns, or the sun. What he did have, however, was an early form of that intense, hard to read, off rhythm syncopation that has come to be so much him. I don't think he'd spent much time out of doors, certainly not in the wilderness, but part of what's so compelling and interesting about his performance, is all these tensions, which definitely, in the end, served the character well.
He approached the character, from an interior point of view, and stayed focused on that. When Chris was staked out, for example, he did a good job of going in and out of delirious fragments which applied to the character, situation, conditions and so on. It was totally improvised, and it is something I find in films, not that easy to do convincingly. Chris' instincts for things like that, and in general are exceptional. I think he nailed the combination of alienation and engagement I had in mind, terrifically. In terms of Mr. Rainbow's aborted sunglasses, and long hair: my original conception was very much as you posited earlier, in terms of the seventies hippy anti-establishment credo. There were many shots of and cut aways to prismatic effects from his sunglasses throughout the script. And, as I mentioned, Chris's initial look was a disappointment to me. However, In retrospect, I think, again, his instincts were great, and served the character better than mine would have. I think my image was too obvious and clichéd. His created a much more universal and certainly more timeless character in terms of 'look'.

Chris ist ziemlich schmal, trägt einen großen Cowboyhut, reitet perfekt, ist einmal nicht der Böse, hilft den Indianern und stirbt NICHT. Und täglich brennt die Sonne nieder. Doch: fast krepiert er einmal, als er an einen Felsen geschmiedet wird und die Aasgeier schon auf ihn warten. Die anderen Goldgräber, die einen Schatz gefunden haben, wollten ihn nicht mehr bei sich haben.

 

	PLOT, COMMENTARY, link to an INTERVIEW with D. Leeds: http://www.walkenworks.com/sunleeds.html http://www.walkenworks.com/sun.html   Shoot The Sun Down 1 Shoot The Sun Down 2 Shoot The Sun Down 3 Shoot The Sun Down 4

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