“The Alamo wasn’t the end. It was the beginning,” promises the History Channel in a new miniseries that premieres on Memorial Day.
The script touched something deep inside me, which was how much I’d always wanted to make a Western.”
Director Roland Joffé’s voice charges with enthusiasm as he describes the emotions he felt during his first reading of producers Leslie Greif and Darrell Fetty’s script for Texas Rising, the History Channel’s eight-hour miniseries event, which airs over four nights beginning on Memorial Day.
After enjoying enormous success with 2012’s Hatfields & McCoys for the History Channel, Greif cast his creative net on the thundering epic saga of the Republic of Texas, its formation after the 1836 battle of the Alamo and the creation of the legendary Texas Rangers who fought to keep the peace.
He found the ideal collaborator in the British Joffé, who has earned Academy Award directing nominations for his first two feature films (1984’s The Killing Fields and 1986’s The Mission), honored for their intensely dramatic, and exquisite, visuals.
“Every Saturday morning, I’d watch Westerns in the cinema, and they became ingrained in one’s imagination,” Joffé warmly recalls. “What I loved about those movies was the way in which geography played such an important part in forming character, and that, in a way, formed some of my thinking of what to do with Texas Rising.”
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