Top 93 Quotes & Sayings by Taylor Sheridan - Page 2

I mean... directing is a holy, unpleasant experience, to be perfectly honest.

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.

I spent most of my time as an actor in television, so directors in television - it's such a machine that's already in place that I don't think you notice the direction as much on the set.

I learned a tremendous amount about dialogue because I suffered as an actor.

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.

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.

You've been entrusted with a lot of money and a lot of careers, and a lot of people put their faith in me, and every director goes through that every time.

With 'Wind River,' I became fascinated with the notion of how you overcome a tragedy - accepting it, making whatever peace you can with it - without ever knowing what really happened.

While I feel it's important for films to examine our society, I don't particularly like watching the films that do it.

To me, a purely good individual or purely bad individual, that's a comic book - that's a fantasy - and I don't do fantasy.

I love to play with the notion of who the protagonist is - who is the audience supposed to root for? I did it in 'Sicario' and feel it was the strength of the script - guiding the audience's allegiance toward the villain because they think he's the hero, until it's revealed that he's the villain.

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.

You can really examine the suffering and consequences that happen when there's a loss in a family.

I think that marriage of music and picture is so vital, especially in a film that's almost exclusively exteriors.

How does one endure in a place they shouldn't be condemned to live in? You could take that same question and apply it to any number of neighborhoods in any number of cities.

I spent a lot of time doing really unimportant work as an actor. It was important when I started writing that I obviously make it entertaining, or no one is going to go see it - but to really make you think, that is my goal.

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.

I had three attorneys dedicated solely to find the statistic of the number of missing Native American women on reservations. Any reservation, not just 'Wind River.' They don't exist. The federal government, which is responsible for the reservations, don't keep those stats.

The machine of awards season is very stressful. But this is the Oscars! It's your peers, your heroes, people you admire, the people who inspired you to get into this work in the first place. It's a pretty overwhelming feeling when you think about it.

Honest communication is a rare thing.

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.

Most of us don't confront pure anything. What our life does involve is a whole lot of 60/40 and 70/30.

There's not a lot of pure evil in the world, but it's amazing how little it takes to do great damage.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In 2005, I visited my home state of Texas, spending time on a ranch outside the town of Post. Then spending some time on a large ranch outside Archer City. I was taken by just how few young people I saw anywhere.

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.

I finished 'Hell or High Water' and started writing 'Wind River' literally the next day.

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.

I don't know if I've ever met anyone that's purely good or purely evil myself. I think most of us live with some varying degrees between the two.

I saved every script I'd ever worked on as an actor.