I don't have any bone to pick with critics. In fact, if I wasn't a filmmaker I would probably be a film critic. Most of my bone is I would be a better film critic than most of the film critics I read.

Don't write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what's in your heart.

I don’t want to be an old-man filmmaker, making old-man movies, and I don’t want to be the one not to know when to leave the party.

Leni Riefenstahl was the one person Goebbels had no control over in the filmmaking community of Nazi Germany, and they despised each other. But because she was Hitler's favorite, she could do what she wanted. She was the only filmmaker that did not have to cow down to Joseph Goebbels.

I hope to give you at least 15 more years of movies. I`m not going to be this old guy that keeps cranking them out. My plan is to have a theater by that time in some small town and I will be the manager this crazy old movie guy.

I don't judge my characters, and that's my job not to judge them. It's my job to treat them with respect and to just look at it from their point of view.

There is no other genre that deals with America better, in a subtextual way, than the Westerns being made in the different decades. The '50s Westerns very much put forth an Eisenhower idea of America, whereas the Westerns of the '70s were very cynical about America.