Keith Carradine Quotes
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[Mel Gibson] played this kind of sadistic motorcycle cop. He was terrific. And he had this great sense of visual comedy.
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I changed my major to English literature, which was on the advice of my father. I finally said, "You know, Dad, to heck with it: I'm just going to be an actor. But I'm going to go to school." And he said, "Well, if you're going to go to school, then major in English literature. Those are the tools you are going to be working with as a man who's going to be acting in English, one would assume."
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Part of my claim to fame is that my first film was also Johnny Cash's first film.
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I mean, it was a rough place ["Wild Bill Hickok"], and you had to wear this kind of cloak that you were a badass, and the most efficient way to do that was with your language. Swearing was just a part of how you got by during the day, and it was quite historically accurate, that depiction.
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My first feature film was a movie called 'A Gunfight,' with Kirk Douglas, Johnny Cash, Karen Black, Jane Alexander, Raf Vallone... It was shot in Santa Fe, Mexico, in 1970, and it was directed by Lamont Johnson. It was the first gig I did when I got to California from having done 'Hair' in New York on Broadway for a year. It was a Western, though! But that film was not a successful release.
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I think time is elastic. There are moments in my life that are many, many years ago and yet I can conjure them as though it's a second ago. And there are other things that happened maybe last week that seem like ages ago.
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I was accepted to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, which is a terrific Aggie school, and they had a great forestry program. But when I saw the syllabus and realized what I was going to actually have to be studying, there was a lot of science! If you want a degree in forestry, it's basically a science degree. And I just thought, "No, no, no, wait a second. Never mind!"
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He was definitely known as the foremost man killer in the West; however there's controversy about virtually every killing that he was known to have been involved in.
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I mean, it [Southern Comfort] is basically a story about the folly of our misadventure into that war, done in the context of these National Guard weekend warriors who wander into a world about which they know nothing and then wind up wreaking havoc on themselves.
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I like the Western genre, I think it's uniquely American.
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I think it [Trouble In Mind] was the only time Divine didn't appear in drag, or certainly one of the few times, anyway. Alan created a time and place that was no time and no place, so it was not identifiable with any particular period or any particular city or any particular country, for that matter. I mean, everybody spoke English, but that was about it. So you couldn't pigeonhole that film.
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Well you know I've been fan of Tony Hillerman's books for years.
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That was Robert Aldrich. And that [Emperor Of The North] was one of the only times I actually got a part in a movie in the conventional way: The role was there, I auditioned, I auditioned again, and then I actually did a full-fledged screen test, which they shot on a soundstage on the lot at 20th Century Fox. They put up a set, and Robert Aldrich actually directed me in this screen test.
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I was actually filming in Atlanta when I got a call from Walter Hill saying, "Well, it could be your turn to play Hickok." I said, "Oh, well, great!" He said, "What's your hair look like?" I said, "Well, it's short, Walter, but... I've still got that wig!" . He said, "Well, bring it!"
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Mel [Gibson] could stage physical comedy and put the camera in such a way... I mean, we did some really funny stuff, and he had some great ideas about how to do it. It was a delight to work with him in that regard.
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I think that the film ["Jim Younger"] still resonates, because there's just something that you can't fake about those kinds of relationships. When you see James and Stacy Keach on the screen together, they're brothers!
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I wouldn't call it ["Wild Bill Hickok"] an urban legend, but I guess I'd call it a rural legend that the cowboy was always soft-spoken, mild-spoken, well-mannered.
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But I love to be outdoors. I prefer being outdoors to, you know, being inside.
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I'd met Harrison Ford before, but he was just finishing a meet with Jon Favreau and the other producers on the film, and we said "hello" as he walked out and I walked in and sat down and had this meeting with those guys. They basically described what they were looking for, and they thought that I brought a certain amount of authenticity to the genre, and would I want to take part? And I said, "Absolutely! I'd love to!"
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Lee Marvin was there at the same time, and I knew obviously it was his movie [Emperor Of The North], and Ernie Borgnine was playing the other part in the movie.I met Marvin there at wardrobe, and he said, "What are you doing for lunch?" I said, "Nothing." He said, "C'mon with me!" And he took me to the commissary. I walked into the commissary with Lee Marvin at 20th Century Fox, and he introduced me to people. He said, "This's Keith Carradine. We're doin' this movie together." He was so cool. I mean, my God.
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So we went off and made this movie ["Jim Younger"], and I've gotta tell ya, it's as much fun as I've ever had making a movie. It was kind of like adult summer camp. We put on this Western gear, strapped on our six-shooters, and went out and played cowboy all day! It wasn't an easy shoot.
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[Mel Gibson] had just directed The Passion [Of The Christ], and it had just been released as we started production on Complete Savages. But I have to say, nobody ever talked about it, and he never brought any of that to work. He was just delightful, and I had a great time.
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One of the wonderful things about the actor's life is that's what we have the opportunity to do; we bring all these aspects of ourselves and of our personal lives into the work that we do.
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[David Milch] had say, "You have to understand that our history of western movies, what we've been doing in westerns since the movies began to talk, you had audiences that would be offended by certain things, and there was a cleaning-up of the way people spoke."
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And so I love films that are kind of rural in atmosphere. And you know, it's just a nice place to be day after day. All be it, it can be hard, it can be hard work. You can get hot.
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I can't put bars on my insides; my love is something I can't hide.
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I changed my major to English and I went off to Fort Collins. And within the first couple of weeks, I noticed that they were having auditions for a production in their theater department. They were going to stage Jean Anouilh's Becket, which was a film I loved, with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. So I went down and auditioned, and I got the role. I got the Peter O'Toole part. So here I was, a 19-year-old playing King Henry.
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Walter [Hill] basically brought me into that ["Wild Bill Hickok"], and it was one of the great experiences. It was extraordinary stuff. He wrote this kind of American Shakespeare. But I played my part for four episodes, and the rest is history!
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The Western genre is certainly something with which I'm familiar.
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When I was in high school... I loved the outdoors, and I was introduced to wilderness camping. I was in a little prep school - a boarding school in southern California, in Ojai - and when I was in this school, they had a camping program, and there would be regular trips: hikes into the mountains, the Sierras, the Sespe River Valley, and different places.
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