But for me, the challenge is how you turn a character into behavior. Once the director says 'action', you just try to live between those two worlds.

When you shift the gear and that little needle on the tach goes into the red and reads 9,000 rpm, that's bad.

Stripping away artifice - it's the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life - but there's nothing bigger than life.

You know, Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don't know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore.

It's a cyclical thing. When they make one, everyone loves them. Different genres come around in succession. People always welcome the western. It's America's genre.

You have a little bit of feeling for everyone you play.

Cows is one thing. But one man telling another man where he can go in this country is something else.