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I'm a storyteller, and I was an actor, so I have a fairly thin grip on reality to begin with.
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I watched a lot of old movies. Clint Eastwood movies, a lot of John Wayne films, a lot of movies that celebrated the region of where I lived.
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I work very hard to line up stereotypes and then smash them with a hammer.
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To get a film in Cannes is a real honor. To have it play and not get booed is a real relief.
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My wife was pregnant, and I was doing the math, and I was realizing that I couldn't be living in a two-bedroom apartment in Hollywood for the rest of my days. I didn't want to raise my kid there.
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I think I was a decent actor, but it took a lot of work for me to make a choice on how to read a line.
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I sent 'Hell or High Water' to Peter Berg, asking if he'd like to be involved.
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I let characters be human and flawed and relatable.
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I believe in the Constitution - and I believe in common sense.
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I had to push exposition through dialogue, which is really, really hard for an actor do.
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I finished 'Hell or High Water' and started writing 'Wind River' literally the next day.
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I'm not the guy to ask to write a sequel.
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Some of the most fascinating scenes in 'Unforgiven,' for me, is that scene with Gene Hackman where he's talking about the Duke of Death that Richard Harris played, and he's basically demolishing this myth of this man very unwesternly – not what you expect in a western.
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Whether we can call 'Hell or High Water' this rogue buddy bank-heist movie, it's also a meditation on assimilation and failure and what happens when someone loses their purpose.
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Part of our job as storytellers is to show people pockets of the world that they don't know. The more we understand, the more we don't judge.
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I can recognize a good actor. I can recognize someone that can convey emotion and that has the essence and not get lost in the minutia of, 'Well, that person's got red hair, and so does the other.' Some of the decisions in casting that seem so important at the time, until you get on set and you're starting to shoot.
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For me, the greatest thing a movie can do is rivet you while you're watching but also give you something to chew on for days and weeks after you've seen it.
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In 2011, I was in Hollywood peddling 'Sicario' to constant and resounding 'no's. Texas was suffering the worst drought on record. Wildfires spread across West Texas, burning some 4 million acres and 3,000 homes. While the urban centers in Texas were experiencing an economic boom, West Texas was collapsing under the weight of drought and fires.
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I look for absurdly simple plots so that I can simply focus on the characters. Having an understanding of what dialogue's easy to say and hard to say - I think that that's helpful, too.
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It's very hard for me to go to the movies because I know all the tricks, and I know everybody. I don't watch many at all. And the ones I do watch are generally much older films.
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You know that saying, 'You broke it, you bought it'? With horses, if you don't make sure it's a good fit... they tend to break you.
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The movies I make - the goal isn't a mass audience. They're not expensive films. So the attempt is to reach a much more limited audience - one would say an audience that enjoys films that challenge them emotionally and intellectually.
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I don't write tracking shots in my screenplays or any camera directions, but I do try to give a sense of how the action is moving.
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I didn't know if I could make a good movie. But I knew I could make a respectful one.