Almost every other Western in the last ten years has failed, since Dances with Wolves.

I want everything I do to have humor in it, because it seems to me that all of life has that.

With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.

Any story that Billy Wilder told, you can tell in a Western.

I mean, the trouble with some of the kind of relationship movies I've done, is there's only so many ways you can shoot a conversation. I was really tired of talking heads.

But, George and Steven asked me to write the Indiana Jones sequels, and I didn't want to.

The movies that made me want to make movies were action movies, and thrillers, and Kurosawa films, you know, where you have an opportunity every day to shoot it in an unusual way. I was looking for something like that.