‘Texas Rising’ — The Men & Women Who Birthed a Republic

Last updated on: October 1, 2024 at 2:40 am by Kate O'Hare

‘Texas Rising’ — The Men & Women Who Birthed a Republic 2024-10-01T02:40:14-08:00 Kate O'Hare

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The conversation continues about the 5-part, 10-hour History Channel miniseries “Texas Rising,” premiering Memorial Day, Monday, May 25 … (click here to read part one).

In the first installment, British-born director Roland Joffé talked about his desire to have male characters that represent traditional masculine values and act as protectors, while also having female characters with equal strength of will.

When executive producer Leslie Greif comes in, he echoes Joffé, saying, “This is when men were men. This isn’t a bunch of old boys. I think the women are going to love that, because they’re tough, they’re grizzled, but they imbue a ruggedness and a virility and a visceral quality of what it was like to be in those days, to be the protector, to be the man.

“The women are very strong in this film. They’re not relegated to the wife or the girlfriend. These are frontier women with rugged stock of what it was like to forge a country. The women are very strong, but they’re strong because they have the men as partners.

“They look up to the men, and the men are protectors, but when the men fall, the women are the first to be able to pick up and stand shoulder to shoulder. That’s what I like about the film. It’s about strength of character of both sexes.

“A lot of these movie stars are old boys and metrosexuals. Perfect this and perfect that. My cast, they didn’t mind looking dirty and being rugged, putting on dirty clothes day after day.”

But all this is not to say that Greif or Joffé downplays the situation of women in society at the time.

Said Greif, “That’s why we really strove to cast our women as very strong characters that had to endure hardships, and in some case, more suffering, because they were women. Back in the lens of 1836, women were not considered on a par with men; it’s just the way it was in those days.”

Nor are they interested in writing revisionist history.

Said Joffé, “Really, for us, the whole thing was a question of balance. History is about geography and struggle. That’s what history is. That means, on either side of the struggle, there are going to be different interpretations of what went on.

“Usually, we’re used to the fact that history is written by the victors. That’s true in almost every event we can think of. The question of revisionist history really is to find the balance.

“The Alamo’s the beginning of events. We’re dealing with the Battle of San Jacinto and what happened afterward. We’re dealing with the birth of a republic, in a sense. Look, what does victory mean? What it meant was, in this case and in this situation, Santa Anna, who was actually a centralist dictator, got defeated.

“The question here, interestingly, is, who were the people who were struggling against him? There were many strands, which were very interesting. There are people in Texas at that time who referred to themselves as Texians. Basically, what it was, it was a struggle between centralists and federalists.

“That said, much of what was going on in Texas was a desire to be free of a central Mexican government. Many Texas, at that stage, envisaged themselves being a federal state inside Mexico. Others had different views. Some felt that what they should really struggle for is a republic on its own; others felt they should be struggling for a republic that would be subsumed, one way or another, into the United States.

“All those strands had points of view, and there were reasons why people were, in a way, included, belonging to those different sides. Our point of view is to say, ‘Look, presume the question of right and wrong — this is a question of allowing people to express themselves in our movie, at the time.'”

Joffé also emphasizes that the past needs to be understood on its own terms, in light of its own reality, not by modern standards.

“In those days,” he said, “there wasn’t such a thing, really, as a nationalist; there weren’t national movements in quite the same way as we know them. It was the beginning of that kind of thing. That stage, generally in Europe and through the world, if you went against a government, whose ever government that was, you weren’t really called a freedom fighter; you were basically called a pirate. The rules of war did not apply to you. That applied all over Europe.

“You could look at Santa Anna with hindsight and say, ‘My God, this man was merciless.’ You might look and say, ‘Well, actually, within the structure of the times, and the political and social structure of that time, the man was only actually doing what other generals around the world were doing at the same time.’

“This was the natural form of events. We don’t have villains and victims in that sense. We have people who are living fully in the times that they’re in. I think that’s really exciting.”

Image: Courtesy History Channel

Previous Post

May 21, 2015

'Texas Rising' Boasts 'Men Who Are Not Afraid to Be Men' (Part 1)

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May 22, 2015 Will Kurt Sutter Go Medieval on the Church in 'The Bastard Executioner'?

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