I can’t go to bed with John Wayne, so I do the next best thing: I go to bed with my girlfriend, who once met the great man. That’s how much I love westerns.
When I was 12, I decided I was only going to watch Westerns for a few months.
I have always loved westerns… supernatural westerns in particular. One of my first professional short story sales was a horror/western story. It wasn’t so great, though, so I’m glad the magazine folded before it saw print.
If you scroll through all the movies I’ve worked on, you can understand how I was a specialist in westerns, love stories, political movies, action thrillers, horror movies, and so on. So in other words, I’m no specialist, because I’ve done everything. I’m a specialist in music.
My parents were huge fans of westerns, European cinema, and horror in particular. They wouldn’t just show me kids’ films.
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.
I was growing up with a single mom who’d be at work when I came home from school. So I’d just turn on the TV. I grew up watching old Clint Eastwood westerns. I adopted him as one of my male role models.
When I was growing up in the ’60s I would have thought that westerns would last forever.
In the John Wayne movies, the Indians were savages that were trying to scalp you. That culture has really suffered because of the stereotype you see in those westerns.
Eventually I would like to touch all the genres. I would like to do some detective stories, and I want to do a Western. I would want to do humorous Westerns.
It could have been extremely boring to write musical scores for only westerns of horror films. It was really exciting for me to work in all these various genres.
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 actually don’t like westerns much. I like good westerns, but it isn’t my preferred genre. There are all kinds of westerns: acid westerns, ’70s westerns, Nicholas Ray’s neurotic westerns. The ones I tend to like are nutso westerns.
I did a Coca-Cola commercial when I was about two and a half years old, and then me and my family were extras in a bunch of Westerns. I loved dressing up and stepping into this imaginary world, and it was fun to get outside of my tiny little town with a bunch of movie weirdos.
In most Westerns, you know, people are shooting off guns all the time until you don’t even notice it anymore.
One of my favorites of all time was with Jim Jarmusch, called ‘Dead Man.’ I was in that with Johnny Depp. I ride really well, and I shoot a gun really well. I love the genre. Once I did Westerns, I was hooked.
The Westerns have probably affected me more than any one thing, Western-related material. I love Westerns.
My grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher, and there was nothing really modern that went on under their roof. We watched television, but they were very picky about what we could watch – old Westerns and stuff that wasn’t vulgar or violent at all.
American popular culture has long been marked by an absence of empathy for American Indians. Westerns doubled as a campaign against so-called savages in a way that desensitized us to the savages we’d become.
When you’re young, you want to make every kind of film: musicals, Westerns, horror. Slowly you begin to hear your own voice. I hope people receive what I do as small, personal films that are somewhat contrarian about their main characters.
I figured if I write a modern thriller but spliced in the DNA of a classic western – the drifter who comes into town with secrets – I could do something interesting with both genres. Westerns are also an incarnation of the classic knight errant tale, the lone warrior with a moral code, and I love those types of stories.
I’m a big fan of period pieces, and I’m a big fan of the old-time westerns.
Hollywood cools, and when it cools you have to go to where the work is. I ran off to Italy to do spaghetti westerns.
I loved Westerns as a little kid, and I loved horror films.
I am not a fan of westerns particularly.
I love westerns, I’d love to make more of them.
I loved spaghetti westerns but besides these pure entertainment movies, there was also something different.
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