The Eagle Director Kevin MacDonald reveals Surprise Cinematic Influence

In a recent interview in MovieWeb.com, The Eagle director Kevin MacDonald talks about making the Roman epic. In one part he reveals some of his suprising cinematic influences.

…lets make it exciting, but make the jeopardy about the few individuals, or the two main individuals and what they had to go through. So the model in a way was the cowboy movie. I looked at a lot of cowboy movies, like The Searchers and the John Ford films. Another was Ulzana's Raid, which was a great '70s reflection of Vietnam but through a cowboy movie. It was about cowboys who get involved in a kind of atrocious thing. They commit these atrocities and it was a reflection of what was going on in Vietnam. In those movies it's really about individuals and the landscape. You can get a sense of huge scale and an epic feel but actually that comes from not having huge numbers of people in one cast