I wouldn't call it ["Wild Bill Hickok"] an urban legend, but I guess I'd call it a rural legend that the cowboy was always soft-spoken, mild-spoken, well-mannered.

I decided, "Well, I'll be a forest ranger!" Because I thought, "I'll get to go out in the woods, I'll be in the forest, and I can sit in a tower and watch for forest fires and play my guitar. That's what I want to do!" Well, I was an idiot, of course.

You have to realize that Mel [Gibson], he's a funny guy. He's got a wicked sense of humor.

Lee Marvin was there at the same time, and I knew obviously it was his movie [Emperor Of The North], and Ernie Borgnine was playing the other part in the movie.I met Marvin there at wardrobe, and he said, "What are you doing for lunch?" I said, "Nothing." He said, "C'mon with me!" And he took me to the commissary. I walked into the commissary with Lee Marvin at 20th Century Fox, and he introduced me to people. He said, "This's Keith Carradine. We're doin' this movie together." He was so cool. I mean, my God.

When I was in high school... I loved the outdoors, and I was introduced to wilderness camping. I was in a little prep school - a boarding school in southern California, in Ojai - and when I was in this school, they had a camping program, and there would be regular trips: hikes into the mountains, the Sierras, the Sespe River Valley, and different places.

I mean, it [Southern Comfort] is basically a story about the folly of our misadventure into that war, done in the context of these National Guard weekend warriors who wander into a world about which they know nothing and then wind up wreaking havoc on themselves.

This ["Cowboys & Aliens"] was an occasion where a studio was willing to spend a lot of money to make a film set in that time and place, but the hook was that they were also going to have aliens from outer space!