Taylor Sheridan Quotes
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I learned a tremendous amount about dialogue because I suffered as an actor.
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Growing up, my mother was a very strong woman who was not very big, about 5'1'', but boy, you grabbed a tiger by the tail if you messed with her. I know grown men that messed with her, and through her wit and intelligence and her no-quit, she never lost a fight. That's very influential on me when I'm telling stories. I love exploring that.
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Until you've been to Cannes, it's hard to describe to someone the magnitude of that festival.
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I was surprised by how much I liked 'Hacksaw Ridge' and its depth.
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If you're going to make a sequel to 'Sicario', you have to - you know, you've got to go beat a brand new path.
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My education - my Ph.D. in storytelling - comes from having worked on it, being a lover of film and watching them, from working with some great writers and some very good TV directors and then working with some who weren't.
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I let characters be human and flawed and relatable. When we do things that aren't that great, we can understand it.
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Unfortunately, there is still much to mine in this world and explore creatively.
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Honest communication is a rare thing.
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In the late '90s, I spent a lot of time on reservations, and there was a level of poverty and injustice that I had not witnessed before. I was shocked by it. This is federally controlled land, and there was an insidious mix of apathy and exploitation.
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'Kramer vs. Kramer' is one of my favorite films, where you have a story that really juxtaposes a lot of ideas that we have about family and about parenting.
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My job is not to give you all the answers. My job is to ask the questions.
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When I write a movie, I write it for me.
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Once I finished 'Sicario,' I knew I wanted to follow it up with 'Hell or High Water.'
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I don't outline. I sit down to write, and I take the ride. If something starts to not feel right, I go back to the last place that felt like jazz to me.
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I think my mission, if I could call it that, as a storyteller is to try and find ways to show how similar we are and not how different we are.
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Where having been an actor was extremely helpful to me was in casting. That's where I think a director who has acted can really shine, and casting is the most important thing you do.
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Don't try and make a movie for someone else. You have to make it for you and trust that you're not that unique. And that'll matter to other people as well.
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I've been very fortunate with my three spec scripts - which is sort of my thematic trilogy of the American Frontier. With 'Sicario', 'Hell or High Water' and then 'Wind River' - which is the third - there were no rewrites. It was the first draft for all three.
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Violence is literally the glue of the cycle of life, and yet I think that we're the only species that does it maliciously.
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Most of us don't confront pure anything. What our life does involve is a whole lot of 60/40 and 70/30.
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I think 'In The Heat Of The Night' was one of the most influential films on me. Looking back now, I can see how influential it was on my screenwriting because here you have what looks to be a crime procedural, and it's actually a study in race and loneliness, and a perception of an era.
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I've made up little mantras for myself, catchphrases from a screenwriting book that doesn't exist. One is 'Write the movie you'd pay to go see.' Another is 'Never let a character tell me something that the camera can show me.'
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To me, 'Unforgiven' is one of the best films ever made. Aside from the fact it takes the genre and kicks it between its legs, it's this fascinating deconstruction of the myth of the West.