Quotes from Taylor Sheridan

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

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.

I work very hard to line up stereotypes and then smash them with a hammer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I broke a lot of conventions. Look, I spent a long time as an actor. I spent a lot of time playing pretty ordinary arcs.

My job is not to give you all the answers. My job is to ask the questions.

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.

I think film cannot only teleport you to places you don't know, but it can help you see people you thought were one way and in fact are another. They can allow us to examine ourselves.

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

'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.