You’re a writer, right? You love to write. What if somebody was going to take that away from you? When you realise someone’s going to take away something you love, a way of life, however you feed your family, you’re confused by it and you try to make a sense of it. But, generally speaking, the kind of person that would take your life away from you is a sociopath. So you can’t even get inside their thinking anyway. You’re going, ’Why are you such an asshole?’ You’ve had it in your school life when you’re a boy, and you probably have it in your neighbourhood, and you think, ’What are you going to do about this?’

“The American West is not a fairy tale place. It’s not like it didn’t happen. It was settled by Europeans and they couldn’t speak the language. They were told the land was up for grabs, and if you were smart enough and you were tough enough, and you were violent enough, you could have what you didn’t have in England or in Italy or in Russia. So it was a rough place out there, the issues of land and the disputes over land were bloody, and it wasn’t that long ago.”