Brad Pitt’s new film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford opens this weekend. The film was based on a novel by the same name by Ron Hansen, who, as it happens, is a friend of Playboy’s Literary Editor Amy Grace Loyd. Ron (pictured here) visited our offices, and after dispensing with some useful gossip about the premiere ("The premiere was a kick, and Brad was as gracious and generous as ever, remembering an inscription I put in a gift first edition to him as if it were an Oscar. [Co-star] Casey [Affleck] also: just an unassuming, talented, solid guy.  I couldn't be happier for the good things coming their way"), he answered some questions about his title character:
 
Playboy: Jesse James is not exactly a neglected character in the American canon. What drew you to write about him, and how does your  interpretation differ from others?
RH: Books and movies about Jesse's bank and train robberies have been fairly faithful to the  events, but no one had yet given Robert Ford, his assassin, his full due. The shooting that occurred on April 3, 1882 was preceded by a complex series of incidents and governmental scheming that forced Bob Ford's hand, but earlier films usually presented him as a just a weasel and traitor out for quick cash, whereas I saw the dance of death that Bob and Jesse were in as a kind of Shakespearean tragedy, with the primary fault in each man being, as always, pride.   

Playboy: One of the things that's been reported about the film is the way people speak—using a 19th century vernacular that will seem very different to our ears. Is that a legacy of your novel? Can you give some examples of how the language differed?
RH: All the language in the film is lifted directly from the novel and is based on my close reading of the newspapers of the era. I took great care to avoid anachronisms by hunting up words in dictionaries of slang to find out when they first came into common use. But, again, my model was Shakespeare, and I didn't hesitate to make my characters somewhat more poetic than they probably were in real life.

Playboy: James was admired and even beloved among pro-Confederacy Missourians, and surely their devotion (and his premature death) helped bestow upon him mythic status. But did he enjoy it throughout the nation, notably the pro-union parts of the country?
RH: No, the state of Missouri was held in contempt because of its inability to stop the James-Younger gang, and Governor Thomas Crittenden was elected there based on a campaign to finally corral them. And yet,  too, there were nickel books by writers who'd never been west of Ohio who used the James brothers as protagonists in wild adventures—a form of fabrication we see in supermarket tabloids today. Eventually, Jesse's murder by Bob, his supposed friend, came to be viewed as a kind of martyrdom for the Confederacy and an example of the pernicious effects of government and the law. And Jesse became a hero for all those who feel hemmed in or put down by society.

Playboy: I find it interesting that Americans don't think of James as a terrorist, although clearly he was. But of course, America has had a lot of terrorists that we don't think of that way—John Brown, the Sons of Liberty (terrorists lite), many more. We still think of James as a more glamorous figure—an outlaw, a misunderstood misfit. I'm often mystified when people wonder who would hide the terrible killer Osama bin Laden, because I think of all the sympathizers who hid the James gang and provided succor and turned them into mythic figures. Why do we have trouble recognizing James as a terrorist?  
RH: Because the James-Younger gang had its origins in the  post-Civil War Reconstruction era, attitudes to the gang were largely governed by political feelings about the War between the States. This was the period, too, of the last frontier and westward expansion when lawlessness of all kinds was often ignored or tolerated. For some these outlaws were terrorists, and they approved of their methods of evening the score against northern industry, banks, and the railroads; and for some they were entertainers akin to the more outrageous rock and hip-hop stars today: seemingly fictional protagonists who were living out the fantasies of the stay-at-homes.     
Playboy: How is it that Frank James and the Youngers who survived Northfield were not executed? Did not some of them eventually leave prison and lead quiet lives? Do you think Jesse could ever have escaped to a place wher he could have lived a quiet life?
RH: I have no idea what determined the fate of those captured in Minnesota, but I know that Frank James was celebrated and honored after he surrendered to Missouri's governor a few months following Jesse's  death, and was eventually acquitted in a court of law because the evidence against him was so circumstantial. Frank finally did live a very quiet life, selling shoes, hitting the lecture circuit with Cole Younger, acting as a  commissioner of a horse racing track, and giving 25-cent tours of the James farm in Kearney. He died in 1915, aged 72. It's plausible Jesse could have had a similar outcome, but it's more likely the excesses of his personality would have gotten in the way. I  think Jesse too much liked the adrenaline rush of living on the edge.   
 
Playboy: I'm sure I will like the new movie, but I loved The Long Riders. What did you think of Walter Hill's film?
RH: Hill does a good job of summing up the decade when the James-Younger gang was operating, and I liked the cinematic quotations from some of the James films that preceded his. The casting of brothers to play brothers was an intriguing choice and the soundtrack is superb. Beautiful horses, too. A very fine film.  I also think Philip Kaufman's The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid is terrific, and particularly liked Robert  Duvall's manic Jesse James.  Interestingly, Henry Fonda played Frank James in two of his own early films, as Johnny Cash did in the 80s, but generally Frank is given short shrift in the movies, probably because the relatively quiet final years of his life are not as compelling as a flamboyant, melodramatic, outrageous death by betrayal.