Western Genre Quotes

You don't just have to see superhero movies. Ultimately, those movies are westerns - superheroes are good guys fighting bad guys in a landscape. In westerns, that divide couldn't be any more clear, but the only superpower you have is that you're a quicker shot than the other guy.

The idea of the western, I believe, as people conceive of it, is really an artifact of the Hays Production Code of the '20s and '30s, and it has really nothing to do with the West and much to do with the influence of middle-European Jews who had come out to Hollywood to present to America a sanitized heroic idea of what America was.

As a Western, 'The Magnificent Seven' was a pretty good film. I don't think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as 'Seven Samurai.'

I was born in 1950, so there were tons of Westerns on TV by the time I was 6, 7, 8 years old. In terms of television, 'Maverick' and 'Have Gun - Will Travel.' But filmically, classics like 'High Noon' and 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' - that's one of my favorite films.

'Unforgiven,' I think, is the best Western ever.

The western is a universal frame within which it's possible to comment on today.

'Red Dawn' was really the most fun I ever had making a movie, because I love Westerns, and I love the idea of being a tomboy, and riding horses and shooting guns.

I'd love to do a Western. A real Western like John Ford used to do. There's not too many of them made, so I don't know if I'll ever get to do that. They're awfully hard movies to make.

'Into The Wild' had a great sense of wild, unpredictable freedom that I loved, and 'Unforgiven' is just a great western with characters that walked the line between right/wrong with an ambiguity that felt very true to frontier life.

I was always raised on cowboy films, and then when I could start making choices about the movies I wanted to watch I found myself wanting to watch gangster films which were slightly more sophisticated than the baseline stuff that was in westerns.

I'm from Texas, and I would love to do an old-fashioned gun-slinging Western.

Nothing ever changes as far as Westerns are concerned. They are the same today as they were years ago.

I think an old-school Western would kind of be really up my alley and would be so fun, I'm so comfortable in that genre and around horses.

Right before Mag Seven I did a movie called The Bull Rider.

I love westerns, I'd love to make more of them.

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

Stagecoach is really my first Western, actually.

I was a big fan of the show 'Deadwood' on HBO, which was created by David Milch. And as soon as I heard that all of those characters on Deadwood were based on real people, the first thing I did was Google everybody.

I never really did a western western.

My discussion is one that has gone all the way from Fistful of Dollars through Once Upon a Time in America. But if you look closely at all these films, you find in them the same meanings, the same humor, the same point of view, and, also, the same pains.

'Meek's Cutoff' by Kelly Reichardt - it's beautifully shot. It's a complex story. The filmmaker gave a very patient and feminine touch to a story that takes place during a period of history that's very masculine, without losing any of the unforgiving harshness of the reality where the characters found themselves in.

When I was starting to get noticed as an actor in the 1970s for something other than the third cowboy on the right who ended up dying in every movie or episode, Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world.

If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it.

'The Duellists' won Cannes, but Paramount didn't know how to release a film about two guys in bizarre breeches, waving swords around. I actually think it's a pretty good Western.

I come from the belief that all good films find their time whether it's on opening week or sometime later. That's certainly true with some of my favourite films that might relate to this [The Assassination of Jesse James] film in terms of cadence like Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, or McCabe & Mrs Miller or Days of Heaven. I found them 10 to 20 years after they were made.