THE HOMESMAN Trailer Features Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank

Having received a warm reception at Cannes 2014 in May, THE HOMESMAN will be hitting theaters stateside in a prime awards season spot – November 14th.

In his Variety’s review, critic Peter Debruge wrote, the film is a “sturdy cross-country Western.”

THE HOMESMAN stars Academy Award-winners Tommy Lee Jones and Hilary Swank, with a supporting cast featuring Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter, Tim Blake Nelson, Academy Award-nominees John Lithgow and Hailee Steinfeld, James Spader and Academy Award-winner Meryl Streep.

When three women living on the edge of the American frontier are driven mad by harsh pioneer life, the task of saving them falls to the pious, independent-minded Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank). Transporting the women by covered wagon to Iowa, she soon realizes just how daunting the journey will be, and employs a low-life drifter, George Briggs (Tommy Lee Jones), to join her.

The unlikely pair and the three women (Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, Sonja Richter) head east, where a waiting minister and his wife (Meryl Streep) have offered to take the women in. But the group first must traverse the harsh Nebraska Territories marked by stark beauty, psychological peril and constant threat.

The screenplay is written by Tommy Lee Jones, Kieran Fitzgerald (The Ballad of Esequiel Hernández) and Wesley A. Oliver (The Company Men, No Country for Old Men), based on the novel by Glendon Swarthout (The Shootist).

Although the action takes place in the western half of the United States, the filmmakers are hesitant to classify THE HOMESMAN as a western.

“I don’t know how you define the term western,” says Jones. “I have the impression that a western is a movie that has horses in it and big hats and that takes place in the 19th century on the west side of the Mississippi river, although I’ve read critics who are bold enough to call a science-fiction movie a western. It’s a term that people use so often that I don’t think it has much meaning anymore.”

The film is directed by Tommy Lee Jones with original music is by Marco Beltrami (The Hurt Locker, 3:10 to Yuma, The November Man). The two previously collaborated on The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005)

I recently spoke to the film’s composer about his music for the film. 

Beltrami said, “I totally changed the way we worked. We recorded the orchestra outside, with no walls for the sound to bounce off of, and then created outside instruments like an outdoor piano where the piano wires were 175 feet long. There were all kinds of neat stuff for that score and the spirit of innovation that he embraces. Tommy Lee Jones is one of those directors that never uses a “temp score” which ups your own creativity in terms of, there is no guide. It’s a very unique movie.”

Jones’ instructions to composer Marco Beltrami were typically succinct. “He told me to be creative and find an authentic source of inspiration for the music,” says Beltrami. “That period was a spare time in American music. The themes we developed drew on the simple folk tunes of the time and are orchestrated to reflect the austere nature of the landscapes and lives of the characters.”

Beltrami wanted to evoke the loneliness and desolation the homesteaders lived with daily. “These women are driven insane by the life that surrounds them,” he says. “The ever-present wind on the plains seemed like a manifestation of that solitude and was a source of inspiration for me.”

THE HOMESMAN will open in theaters November 14.

https://www.facebook.com/TheHomesmanMovie