Kevin Jarre
If you thought that being both the writer and director meant you can do everything you want, you should know that Kevin Jarre got fired for this. “It was sad for me,” Biehn explained. “I liked Kevin a lot. He was the one that wrote the script. He really wanted that script to be the way he wanted it to be. He wanted to cast it the way he wanted to cast it. He wanted the saddles to look the way he wanted them to look. He wanted the spurs to be a certain way. He wanted the mustaches to be a certain way. He wanted the dialogue to be a certain way.”
Departure
He was not the only cast member who felt this way about Kevin Jarre. “The biggest challenge for everybody in this picture and particularly Kurt [Russell] was that they got rid of Kevin Jarre,” Sam Elliott said. “The sad part of it was this guy was a brilliant writer, and he knew the elements. He brought all those elements together…It was heartbreaking.” Luckily, they pulled it off. Elliott added, “All of us actors had a real feeling for Kevin. “Kurt was the one who said, ‘We gotta pull this thing off, do this for him.’”