I
like dressing up. Because, like, Mrs Bucket [in Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory], I was the one who asked for teeth. They’re not my
real teeth, although Tim keeps thinking they are. I know, but I think
there’s something sweetly romantic about it. Just think: after being an
ape, after all that, he saw through to the real me!
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.”