Do you see a lot of movies these days?

LQ: No, not many anymore. I go to the Director's Guild...for years, they kept me a seat at the back row, and then would put up a pot figuring out how long I was gonna last.

You walk out of a lot of movies?

LQ: Yeah, I walked out of so many, and I didn't want to disturb anybody else. So they put me on the back row. A lot of times I was gone in three to five minutes. That doesn't mean they don't have talent; the kids today have as much talent as anybody ever had. But they don't have the chance...talent's a muscle, it's not just something you're given or that you can turn off and on. If you don't use it, it atrophies. Look at me -- 500 pictures. 500 times I've been there. Most kids today are extraordinarily lucky if they can stay in the business for three years and do ten pictures. They don't have a chance. They really don't have a chance to develop their talent. And it shows, to me. We've moved away from ensemble casts; now it's the star. Then we had the star, too, but a smart star went out of his way to pick great character actors to fill it and help him. And now they don't do it. I don't care for the writing, particularly; I think the directing is aimless. But that's not fair, because I haven't seen every show. I haven't seen every actor.

The other day at the SAG Awards, Josh Brolin gave an unusually irreverent speech about how the studio system does not work.

LQ: It ceased working probably thirty years ago. And if we're not careful, it will get to a point to where we don't need the business. To me it needs a mayor, it needs a Warner, it needs a Cohen. They were thieves, thugs, miscreants, but God somehow gave them an understanding of the big screen. For their time -- they would die in it today, of course. But then, they understood it. And once we lost those people, we sagged into what we're into now -- committees and attorneys, attorneys own and control our business. And they're much smarter than we are about making money. But they don't need good pictures to make money.

God, if you think about it, we did Mask of Zorro for $90 million. When I started in the business, the budget for the entire output of Hollywood wasn't half that much, and we put it into one picture! Who makes the rules? How can one person say, that's the money we're gonna spend, and that's how we're going to spend it.

Do you think that the old school studio heads cared more about making good movies?

LQ: No, no, they didn't care about good movies; they cared about a lot of money. And their theory was, and I sat with them and listened to them, was "we're gonna make this picture." But the committee says, "It's gonna lose money!" And they said "That's right. It is going to lose money. But we need to educate people that this is what a picture can do. So we'll make it, and we'll eat the loss. But five years down the line, we'll play to these same kids that saw this picture, but didn't quite understand it. But now we know how to get to them, so we are guaranteeing an audience."

Today, since a producer probably produces three pictures in his lifetime and he's gone, what does he care about what's happening? I don't mean he's a terrible person, but he's worried about today and tomorrow, not three or four years from now. But that's what Warner did, because he had to keep business going. And now, eventually -- and you'll pardon my language -- you're gonna get tired of tits, and cars running through walls!

Well, some people will not get tired of that.

LQ: Some people will not. But see, that's who we're making pictures for. Remember, back in the old days, you made pictures for the family. Now you make it for a splinter group. Look at the Lion King. What was the income from the Lion King? 4 Billion dollars? And the most significant picture we've had in the last thirty years not making a tenth of that. But they don't have the guts to go out and do what the Lion King did, which was to go back to the family audience. Whether you're six or six hundred, you'll enjoy the picture. Now we do splinter groups. And we have a shot at reasonably guaranteed income. Or, reasonably guaranteed failure. Because only so many people are going to go see it. Why don't we go for the mass audience again? I guess because we're gutless.

In all honesty, I say to myself, if I'm going to invest $100-150 million, am I going to take the chance that I'm going to lose it? Probably not. I can sit there and tell you that I will, but that's BS. I did with A Boy and His Dog; if Boy had gone down the tube I was bankrupt. Because most of it was my money. But that's ok, because I saw what I wanted and I took my swing. If I missed, at least I had the use of the hog.

Would you have benefited from the backing of a studio and its resources when you made A Boy and His Dog?

LQ: The last time [studios] talked to me about Boy, they wanted a budget of $80 million. $400,000 -- they spend more than that for paper clips! Would I have made a better picture with more money? The answer is, guaranteed not. Because we had to think, what will work? And you had to take a gamble, and that's where the fun comes in.

So what's life like these days?

LQ: Eh...working on bankruptcy! Like I say, build a house, plant a tree, and direct A Boy and His Dog. But I work wherever I can; the last one I did was A Prairie Home Companion, 'cause I wanted to work with Bob [Altman] and the cast. We had a ball. Nobody was being paid much money, and we did what we wanted to do, and it was just fun.

But they sent me a script a month ago, from a major: three of the biggest comics in the business, I had the lead...and I almost didn't get past the first page. Because it was an offer I read to page 30, and I finally said I can't take any more. I called the agent and said "Tell them thank you very much, I appreciate the thought." A ton of money, and I just said I can't make it. I would never be able to face my children if I sat in public and talked like that.

So you put a lot of thought into choosing your roles.

LQ: Oh yeah. I'm independently poor; I can do what I want to do. I don't do television - I did that one because they asked, as a favor. Super. But I love to work! If you'd let me alone I'd work 52 weeks out of the year, acting.

But it was the vocabulary -- first of all, the script was no good. I would have turned it down for that. But the other was the words. I was telling my agent, I couldn't talk like that to him if it was only the two of us in a men's gymnasium, and we could whisper. But I could not say those words in public -- no, I will not say those words in public. Normally now when I get a script, I look at it; if there are a lot of curse words in it, I go through and take 95 percent of them out. But this one, there was an expletive every other word. Wasn't one or two a page, it was twenty a page. I couldn't understand, it didn't help the story any. And it didn't turn me on.

But somebody give me a decent script, or say hey it's not right yet, but let's go to work on it and maybe we can do something. I don't care about the money, I just care about the fun that goes with it. And it is still fun; if it weren't, I'd go raise onions.

As a veteran of so many Westerns, have you seen the neo Westerns of the last year -- 3:10 to Yuma, Assassination of Jesse James, No Country for Old Men?

LQ: I've not seen them, but I want to; and yet I didn't like 3:10 to Yuma as an original picture, because it's a dull picture. I understand [the new one] is not, and I want to see it for that reason. I don't like the Westerns we do, generally. Because almost all the Westerns we do, you could just as well put them in a Mercedes and shoot a stockbroker. It'd be the same thing.

The thing that bothers me about Westerns, on which I'm a fair expert 'cause I've done about three hundred of them...a Western is a very simple morality play. The good and the bad should be fairly evident, and you have to let them work it out. But it must stay simple; if it gets complicated, if you need words to explain what you're looking at on the screen, it's not working. A Boy and His Dog, as we put it together, I could sit and watch it with no sound and know exactly what was happening on the screen, which is what it should do, which Westerns used to do. But then we said wouldn't it be fun if they started getting intellectual? They are not intellectual pictures. They are very simple people, simple truths done simply. Not simplistic; but simple, and there's a difference.

What's your favorite movie that you've done?

LQ: There's only one picture that I didn't have fun on. But truly the favorite will be the next one that I do. Everyone always says, "Oh, The Wild Bunch!" The Wild Bunch is not a good picture -- it's a good happening, but it's not a good picture. If you want to see a good picture that Sam directed, go see Ride the High Country. Ride the High Country is a brilliant picture! Or The Ballad of Cable Hogue. The Iron Cross -- much better. But The Wild Bunch stands out by itself.