Surrounded Director Reveals Westerns That Inspired His Take on the Genre

With the upcoming movie Surrounded, director Anthony Mandler had a lot of wells to draw from.  Written by Andrew Pagana and Justin Thomas, the new western stars Black Panther's Letitia Wright as Moses Washington, already a pretty major deviation from the westerns of the past. Speaking with ComicBook.com in a new interview, we asked Mandler if there was any specific Westerns that he grew up with that he deliberately drew inspiration from, his answer revealed him to be a filmmaker fully in control of his process but also someone with a deep understanding of the genre.

"Well, I've been saying this a lot today. I wrote my senior thesis at film school on the western, on Shane to Unforgiven exploring the sort of tropes and the reversal; sort of going from the classic western to the anti-western. And so those have always had a huge influence on me. And the Western is a movie that I've always wanted to make. So when I saw the opportunity with Surrounded to take those tropes and sort of turn them on their head and, and drag the audience in the deep water of character. That was really what brought me in."

Wright stars in the film alongside Billy Elliot's Jamie Bell as Tommy Walsh, Burn Notice's Jeffrey Donovan as Wheeler, Stranger Things star Brett Gelman as Mr. Fields, and in one of his final film roles, the late Michael Kenneth Williams as Will Clay. MGM describes Surrounded as follows: 

"Five years after the Civil War, freedwoman and former Buffalo Soldier Moses 'Mo' Washington travels west to lay claim on a gold mine disguised as a man after her stagecoach is ambushed by a group of murderous thieves. Mo is forced to hold legendary outlaw Tommy Walsh captive while the remaining surviving passengers seek out help."

Surrounded will be released digitally by MGM on June 20.