If you want to get an email to Robert Redford, you send it to his assistant, and she prints it out. And then he will write you a letter, which is incredibly rare and incredibly classy. Unfortunately, I can't be that removed from technology.
Taylor Sheridan
People in Texas wear cowboy hats; they're good at keeping the sun off your neck and face.
Bad people sometimes do good things, and good people do really bad things or do something the audience disagrees with.
When I write a movie, I write it for me.
I like to describe 'Yellowstone' is 'The Great Gatsby' on the largest ranch in Montana. Then it's really a study of the changing of the West.
You've been entrusted with a lot of money and a lot of careers, and a lot of people put their faith in me, and every director goes through that every time.
I work very hard to line up stereotypes and then smash them with a hammer.
I mean... directing is a holy, unpleasant experience, to be perfectly honest.
I can recognize a good actor. I can recognize someone that can convey emotion and that has the essence and not get lost in the minutia of, 'Well, that person's got red hair, and so does the other.' Some of the decisions in casting that seem so important at the time, until you get on set and you're starting to shoot.
How can you tell your kid, 'You can be anything you want to be,' if you're not trying to do the same?
With 'Wind River,' I became fascinated with the notion of how you overcome a tragedy - accepting it, making whatever peace you can with it - without ever knowing what really happened.
As a television actor, I was held to a tight, rigid structure.
I just lost interest in performing.
Once I finished 'Sicario,' I knew I wanted to follow it up with 'Hell or High Water.'
I look for absurdly simple plots so that I can simply focus on the characters. Having an understanding of what dialogue's easy to say and hard to say - I think that that's helpful, too.
Violence is literally the glue of the cycle of life, and yet I think that we're the only species that does it maliciously.
'Kramer vs. Kramer' is one of my favorite films, where you have a story that really juxtaposes a lot of ideas that we have about family and about parenting.
The machine of awards season is very stressful. But this is the Oscars! It's your peers, your heroes, people you admire, the people who inspired you to get into this work in the first place. It's a pretty overwhelming feeling when you think about it.
I think I was a decent actor, but it took a lot of work for me to make a choice on how to read a line.
Sugarcoating doesn't do anybody any good.
Whether we can call 'Hell or High Water' this rogue buddy bank-heist movie, it's also a meditation on assimilation and failure and what happens when someone loses their purpose.
I believe in the Constitution - and I believe in common sense.
My education - my Ph.D. in storytelling - comes from having worked on it, being a lover of film and watching them, from working with some great writers and some very good TV directors and then working with some who weren't.
I think my mission, if I could call it that, as a storyteller is to try and find ways to show how similar we are and not how different we are.
Part of our job as storytellers is to show people pockets of the world that they don't know. The more we understand, the more we don't judge.
You can really examine the suffering and consequences that happen when there's a loss in a family.
Every writer has written a spec. It's the first thing you write, and it basically stands as a means of, 'Here's an example of how I tell stories.' It's almost like a business card.
I made a very conscious decision to quit acting. I was on a series, and we were in the process of renegotiating. They had an idea of what they thought I was worth, and I had an idea that was quite different.
Until you've been to Cannes, it's hard to describe to someone the magnitude of that festival.
In the late '90s, I spent a lot of time on reservations, and there was a level of poverty and injustice that I had not witnessed before. I was shocked by it. This is federally controlled land, and there was an insidious mix of apathy and exploitation.
Unfortunately, there is still much to mine in this world and explore creatively.
Think about 'GoodFellas': It could be a textbook on how not to write a screenplay. It leans on voice-over at the beginning, then abandons it for a while, then the character just talks right into the camera at the end. That structure is so unusual that you don't have any sense of what's going to happen next.
I'm a storyteller, and I was an actor, so I have a fairly thin grip on reality to begin with.
I learned a tremendous amount about dialogue because I suffered as an actor.
I watched a lot of old movies. Clint Eastwood movies, a lot of John Wayne films, a lot of movies that celebrated the region of where I lived.
I let characters be human and flawed and relatable.
I've made up little mantras for myself, catchphrases from a screenwriting book that doesn't exist. One is 'Write the movie you'd pay to go see.' Another is 'Never let a character tell me something that the camera can show me.'
Plot is just not my gift. I'm fascinated with complex characters, and that doesn't mix well with complex plots. And by the way, when the plot is simple, you can move one piece around and make it feel fresh. Hell or High Water's a good example: I don't tell you why the brothers are robbing the bank.
You know that saying, 'You broke it, you bought it'? With horses, if you don't make sure it's a good fit... they tend to break you.
I didn't know if I could make a good movie. But I knew I could make a respectful one.
My job is not to give you all the answers. My job is to ask the questions.
I think film cannot only teleport you to places you don't know, but it can help you see people you thought were one way and in fact are another. They can allow us to examine ourselves.
I was going to be the head wrangler at a ranch in Wyoming, and the reason I didn't take the job is because I couldn't have my family there - the family had to stay in town. I just wasn't willing to do that.
Sometimes audiences want to see what we're doing to their world. It's our obligation sometimes to reflect it.
I've been fortunate to work with partners like Weinstein and John and Art Linson in developing 'Yellowstone' and am grateful that it has found a home in the Paramount Network. The show is both timely and timeless.
I don't outline. I sit down to write, and I take the ride. If something starts to not feel right, I go back to the last place that felt like jazz to me.
I thought of Jeff Bridges in 'Hell or High Water' and Ben Foster, and I kept trying very hard not to, because you're terrified you're going to write this thing that then feeds specifically to this one person that then won't do it.
I broke a lot of conventions. Look, I spent a long time as an actor. I spent a lot of time playing pretty ordinary arcs.
I'm a big believer in,'If anyone can understand my politics, I've failed.' If you can get a sense of which side of the fence I'm on, then I'm not doing a service. I'm preaching, and that's not my job.
If you're going to make a sequel to 'Sicario', you have to - you know, you've got to go beat a brand new path.
