Taking Aim at Jesse James & History

The backdrop of filmmaking often involves luck, happenstance, ephemeral things.

A Hollywood magazine publisher spots a lovely teen at a cafe. Her name is Julia Turner, and Julia becomes Lana Turner.

A filmmaker walks into a used bookstore.

Australian filmmaker Andrew Dominik was in Melbourne, hanging out with friend Rowland Howard, the Australian rock musician, when they strolled into a second-hand bookstore three years ago. Howard picked up a title, started reading it, then stopped. "He said, 'Wow, this would make a good movie,' and he handed me the book," recalls Dominik. It was Hansen's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."

Dominik purchased the book, left the bookstore, and started reading. "It knocked me out."

His latest film project had collapsed. He needed work. So he phoned his agent in California. "My agent said, 'Jesse James? Oh, I can sell that. Jesse James is like Batman.' "

The wonderful and enduring and rollicking and complex myth of Jesse James was aloft anew.

Dominik -- with only one movie under his belt, the critically acclaimed "Chopper," about a crazed Australian convict -- had talked off and on with Pitt about working together. Pitt, who hails, like James, from Missouri, read the book, listened to Dominik's pitch and signed on to play James. "Brad committed within 48 hours. It rarely happens that way," confesses Dominik.

The director says he ignored the fact that westerns have essentially been the province of American filmmakers, of directors like John Ford. And there have been many James movies, including Samuel Fuller's 1949 "I Shot Jesse James." Dominik, who also wrote the screenplay, chose to simply focus on the characters on the pages of Hansen's novel. "The thing I really responded to, at first, was Jesse, because I liked the sense of this person wandering around in the ashes of his life. But then, the character I really began to feel strongly about was Robert Ford. Ford went through something few people can really fathom."

He goes on: "I don't think Bob even sees Jesse. Bob just wants to matter. But he seems like he has no sense of boundary."

Before he began filming, Dominik studied daguerreotypes from the era. Old photos of villains with pinched faces, with light-colored eyes; men in suspenders with cryptic smiles.

He had his James in Pitt.