I'd met Harrison Ford before, but he was just finishing a meet with Jon Favreau and the other producers on the film, and we said "hello" as he walked out and I walked in and sat down and had this meeting with those guys. They basically described what they were looking for, and they thought that I brought a certain amount of authenticity to the genre, and would I want to take part? And I said, "Absolutely! I'd love to!"

[David Milch] had say, "You have to understand that our history of western movies, what we've been doing in westerns since the movies began to talk, you had audiences that would be offended by certain things, and there was a cleaning-up of the way people spoke."

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.

But I love to be outdoors. I prefer being outdoors to, you know, being inside.

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.

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 was accepted to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, which is a terrific Aggie school, and they had a great forestry program. But when I saw the syllabus and realized what I was going to actually have to be studying, there was a lot of science! If you want a degree in forestry, it's basically a science degree. And I just thought, "No, no, no, wait a second. Never mind!"