Gun: The Randall Jahnson Interview

A big difference, though, was the developing process. In the film world, you write your script, hand it in, and pray to God the studio or the director or the megastar like it and then you wait for production to begin and end and enter post- and two or three years later -- it's in a theater, if you're lucky.

Writing "Gun" was like being in pre-production, production, and post- all at the same time. We'd have meetings at Neversoft to discuss some story/plot issues and at the same time they'd be showing me some rudimentary animation for missions and the artwork for characters or locations.

For a writer that's very inspiring -- but also a little crazy.

IGN: What kind of research did you do to write the script for Gun?

Jahnson: I guess you could say I've been researching this all my life. Like my two older brothers, I've had a real passion for the Old West for as long as I can remember.

I never had to go any farther than my own library for much of the research. I'm a book collector and I've been accumulating works about the Old West for years.

Also, the maternal side of my family is from western Missouri (or "Missoura," as the locals say), which is where Jesse James and his close associates, the Younger Brothers, hailed from. The area was a hotbed of violence during the Civil War; the James and Younger boys were part of William Quantrill's band of Confederate guerillas who brutally clashed with occupying Federal troops and Jayhawkers, the anti-slavery irregulars. After the war, of course, the James-Younger Gang graduated to further notoriety until they met with disaster in Northfield, Minnesota in 1876.

After serving 20-plus years in prison, Cole Younger came home, settled down and found God. A cousin of mine, now in her 90s, used to sit on his lap when he'd get a haircut at her father's barbershop. At a family reunion when I was 12 years old, I made a pilgrimage to Cole's grave in Lee's Summit. I still have the Polaroid of me posing proudly - big hair, thick glasses - next to his headstone. You'd think I'd found the Holy Grail!

Ghost towns, too, were an obsession of mine for a long time. Not the touristy ones like Tombstone or Deadwood (though they can be fun), but the real remote sites that are little more than a dot on the map, if mentioned at all, and accessible only by four-wheel drive. I've spent many trips bouncing down some godforsaken dirt road in search of places with names like Elkhorn, Chloride, Jackrabbit, Pahreah....

Wandering amongst these desolate ruins can really give you a vivid sense of what life was like back then - it was hard, man!

One time I was in Arizona with a buddy and we were checking out a ghost town called Gleeson, which is nestled in the arid Dragoon Mountains a dozen miles or so east of Tombstone. When we were driving in I thought I'd heard gunfire, but didn't pay much attention to cuz it seemed far off. We got out of the car to get a look at an old archway that used to be the schoolhouse. Walking ahead of my friend to get a picture, I kept noticing these "bugs" that were buzzing over my head. Damn, they're flying fast, I thought. Then I heard my friend yell, "Randy!"

I turned around and saw Ethan flat on his belly. "Get down," he said. "Those are bullets!"

We hung low for a moment, then called out, "Got your message! We're leaving!" We scrambled back to the car and high-tailed it. We never saw the shooter(s) nor can I say for sure he/they were shooting at us -- perhaps we were at the end of the trajectory of some plinkin' going on on the other side of the hill -- but we didn't stick around to find out.

When writing "Gun," I came across this saying in a book of cowboy slang: "The whine of a bullet is a hint in any man's language."

Ain't that the truth.