- I want to be able to make westerns like [Akira Kurosawa] makes westerns.
- The end of a picture is always an end of a life.
- [interview in Le Devoir, 10/12/74] I don't want to hear it said that I don't like women! I tried to show in [Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)] that I adore them. They represent the positive pole of the film, the life force and instinct.
- [on Kris Kristofferson] I like Kris because he writes poetry and he's a fucking good man. Working with Kris on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) was one of the great experiences of my life.
- [recalling how close The Losers (1963) came to becoming a series] "The Losers" was a funny show. We had Keenan Wynn and Lee Marvin locked up for a series with it until Tom McDermott wouldn't pay Lee's price. Well, after the show continued to draw a large segment of the audience around the sixth time out, McDermott called Lee and raised the ante to something like a million dollars and Lee told him to go stick it up his ass! I've always liked Lee for that--it cost me a lot of money at the time but I would've done the same thing in Lee's place.
- [Discussing the protagonist of his series, The Westerner (1960)] I wanted to create a truly realistic saddle bum of the west. I wanted to make him as honest and real as I could do it. I drew him unlettered--most of these guys couldn't read or write. Not too bright. Certainly unheroic. I know cowboys. I grew up on a cattle ranch--in Merced County [California]. I wanted to draw a real one. No hero, no lawman, no bounty hunter--a real saddle tramp. That's what Dave Blassingame is--a saddle tramp. Sure, sometimes he gets into funny situations--like in "Libby". Sometimes he tries to be a hero, like in "Jeff", tries to rescue a girl from a lousy life and the bum she's in love with. But he fails because he's not cut from any heroic mold.
- [on his departure from The Rifleman (1958)] I walked from the series because Jules V. Levy and that group had taken over my initial concept and perverted it into pap. They wouldn't let [Johnny Crawford] grow up; they refused to let it be the story of a boy who grows to manhood learning what it's all about.
- [on Four Star Productions, Dick Powell and the genesis of The Rifleman (1958)] I did this one script for Gunsmoke (1955) that Charles Marquis Warren turned down--said it was a piece of shit! I knew it was one of the best things I'd written, so I took it back and reworked it and Dick Powell at Four Star bought it as a pilot for "The Rifleman". Dick Powell was really a fine gentleman and the eagle behind Four Star's success; he helped me a great deal. I didn't direct the first "Rifleman"; Arnold Laven did that. I just wrote it. I did direct four of them before I left, however. The first one I directed I also wrote, called "The Marshal" [The Marshal (1958)]. It was the episode that brought in Paul Fix as the reformed drunk who became the marshal--a part he played for five years.
- [Responding to critics of his films as being too violent] Well, killing a man isn't clean and quick and simple. It's bloody and awful. And maybe if enough people come to realize that shooting somebody isn't just fun and games, maybe we'll get somewhere.
- [on R.G. Armstrong] R.G. Armstrong played righteous villainy better than anybody I've ever seen.
- The whole underside of our society has always been violence and still is. Churches, laws--everybody seems to think that man is a noble savage. But he's only an animal. A meat-eating, talking animal. Recognize it. He also has grace and love and beauty. But don't say to me we're not violent.
- [on how screenwriting allowed him to become a director] Yeah, but it was hell, because I hate writing. I suffer the tortures of the damned. I can't sleep and it feels like I'm going to die any minute. Eventually, I lock myself away somewhere, out of reach of a gun, and get it on in one big push. I'd always been around writers and had friends who were writers, but I'd never realized what a lot of goddamned anguish is involved. But it was a way to break in. I paid my dues in this business. I was a go fer, a stagehand. I swept studios and I watch a few good people work. The I started writing and finally selling TV scripts. And after a while I decided to try my hand at movies. I always had two or three projects going at a time. I'd put everything into them and I'd sell a few and then they'd disappear.
- There is a great streak of violence in every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out in war or in madness.
- [on which film directors have clout] Kurosawa has it. Fellini. Bergman. But no American has it. Some, like Kubrick and Nichols, think they do, but they don't. It's not just a question of what happens to you during shooting and editing: it's what they do to you once the film is entirely out of your hands. [John] Huston once almost had total control, but he blew it on The Red Badge of Courage, when he walked away from the cutting of the picture. I'm a great admirer of his, anyway. Every picture of Huston's has tried not only to tell a story but to make some kind of statement. The perfect films of this kind are The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I wish I could make a film that good. Compared with John Huston, I'm still in seventh grade-but I'm moving up.
- [on Kurosawa's "The Bad Sleep Well"]: Bad soap opera on the grand scale! Very pretentious - which is what I resent in a picture more than anything else, that fatal weakness of so many really astonishingly good directors.
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