Four seasons. Taylor Sheridan (the man in tbe background). Kevin Costner. Confess: one of my favourite actors. Even loved „Waterworld“, and „The Postman“. Now this: four seasons of „Modern Western Noir“. Great acting. Great directing. Won‘t lift the soul in a naive way, but keeps you flowing with waves, kind of. Dark waves. Angels all gone. Evrything’s broken, like in that Dylan song. But: John Steinbeck would have loved it. In the words of Mr. Sheridan:
You still hang out with cowboys. Do they watch a lot of westerns?
Oh, it’s all they watch. [Laughs.] Every cowboy I know has a copy of “Lonesome Dove” and has watched it 700 times. They don’t watch anything but cowboys.
You got your start in Hollywood as an actor on TV series like “Sons of Anarchy” and “Veronica Mars.” Did anyone on those shows become a mentor when you started writing your own screenplays?
Honestly? My mentor was Cormac McCarthy. My mentors were Larry McMurtry and Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez and John Steinbeck. All the writers who moved me.
I’ve never taken a screenwriting class in my life. Most of the television work I did was not very good. I never had a fancy agent, so I never got to read for the really good movies. When I quit acting and decided to tell my own stories, I had kept most of the scripts I auditioned for and a bunch of them that I’d done, so I sat down and spent about four days rereading them. I told myself, “OK, I have no idea how to do this, but I just spent four days reminding myself how not to.”
What did you take away from that? What are you aiming for with your work?
I hope it will be an honest reflection of the world and will feel authentic. I try to write dialogue I think is believable coming from people’s mouths, but I also like it to be slightly elevated. I’m trying to make it sound a little timeless. When I write a screenplay, I try to write a book. When I shoot a TV show, I try to shoot a movie.