I have no regrets, because I’ve done everything I could to the best of my ability.
Going to Santa Fe is like going to Greece. It’s not that special compared to other areas. The pinon pines are no different than pinon pines elsewhere. But there has been culture there longer than in most places, and you feel it.
I work because I want to work. Work keeps me going.
The important thing about a sport is the people who devote their lives to it.
I’m interested in that thing that happens where there’s a breaking point for some people and not for others. You go through such hardship, things that are almost impossibly difficult, and there’s no sign that it’s going to get any better, and that’s the point when people quit. But some don’t.
Be careful of success; it has a dark side.
Part of me is drawn to the nature of sadness because I think life is sad, and sadness is not something that should be avoided or denied. It’s a fact of life, like contradictions are.
I don’t know what your childhood was like, but we didn’t have much money. We’d go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.
I believe in mythology. I guess I share Joseph Campbell’s notion that a culture or society without mythology would die.
The technology available for film-making now is incredible, but I am a big believer that it’s all in the story.
I have the freedom to take chances, to say no. I have the freedom to be who I really want to be, rather than have to conform to this or that just to stay alive.
I’ve always liked speed. I own a car that I shouldn’t be talking about because I’m an environmentalist, but the 1955 Porsche Spyder 550 RS is the finest sports car ever made.
I was seen in earlier years by family members and people of authority as somebody wasting his time. I had trouble with the restrictions of conformity. It made me edgy.
I never had a problem with my face on screen. I thought it is what it is, and I was turned off by actors and actresses that tried to keep themselves young.
I really do miss being able to go through life a little less noticed.
I just wanted to paint and sketch and tell stories by drawing.
I’m not much interested in sport just as sport. I wouldn’t be interested in making a golf film or baseball or fishing film.
Get emotionally connected to your story so you can deliver it, you know, if you can’t deliver the emotions to your script there’s no point to your story.
I don’t think about when it’s going to stop and what you do before it stops. You just keep moving.
For ‘Jeremiah Johnson,’ nobody wanted to make that film. I went to Sydney Pollack, and I said, ‘Sydney, I live in the mountains, and I would like to make a film about a person that had to exist in the mountains and survive in the mountains.’
