I changed my major to English literature, which was on the advice of my father. I finally said, "You know, Dad, to heck with it: I'm just going to be an actor. But I'm going to go to school." And he said, "Well, if you're going to go to school, then major in English literature. Those are the tools you are going to be working with as a man who's going to be acting in English, one would assume."

He was definitely known as the foremost man killer in the West; however there's controversy about virtually every killing that he was known to have been involved in.

You know, for an actor to come into the midst of that, it's - It can either be difficult and somewhat unnerving, or it can be very embracing and like, kind of stepping into a nice hot tub.

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!"

So we went off and made this movie ["Jim Younger"], and I've gotta tell ya, it's as much fun as I've ever had making a movie. It was kind of like adult summer camp. We put on this Western gear, strapped on our six-shooters, and went out and played cowboy all day! It wasn't an easy shoot.

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.

My first feature film was a movie called 'A Gunfight,' with Kirk Douglas, Johnny Cash, Karen Black, Jane Alexander, Raf Vallone... It was shot in Santa Fe, Mexico, in 1970, and it was directed by Lamont Johnson. It was the first gig I did when I got to California from having done 'Hair' in New York on Broadway for a year. It was a Western, though! But that film was not a successful release.