Quotes / Samuel Fuller

By Fuller

"I love the West. I read a lot about the West, and I'm shocked, I'm ashamed that in pictures they have not made the true story of the winning of the West — comprising 90 percent foreigners, 100 percent laborers, nothing to do with guns. Streets, mountains, roads, bridges, streams, forests — that's the winning of the West to me. Hard! Tremendous, tremendous fight. But we have, as you know [instead], cowboys and indians and all that. Shane comes into town, cleans it up and leaves. He's doing that every week now on TV."

— Samuel Fuller, director of three westerns.

"One of the most despicable, ruthless, falsely publicized characters in the American western folklore, Jesse Woodson James, a true bastard. He was so low that his first job was to rob a train with his brother, and the train was a hospital train filled with wounded soldiers. They killed all the wounded soldiers and took the few dollars. He and his brother were two illiterate, uncouth rats. They were fifteen and seventeen years old when they joined Quantrill's Raiders, during the Civil War. Jesse James at fifteen was assigned a joy by Quantrill: he would masquerade as a girl, pick up soldiers and bring them into a house called the House of Joy, a house of prostitution. He would get drunk with the soldiers — he had a very pretty face — and when they all got drunk, he and Quantrill would kill the soldiers and rob them. That was Jesse James...He was no good. But thanks to many pop-magazine writers, he was celebrated and, over a period of years, he became a hero."

— Samuel Fuller

"Film is a battleground. Love, hate, violence, action, death...In a word, emotion."

— Sam Fuller in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou (1965)

About Fuller

"One of the things that struck me about Jack was the similar temperament, and even the physical similarities between him and a filmmaker by the name of Samuel Fuller. Probably their backgrounds were similar: They're both of a certain generation that fought World War II as teenagers; both were from New York, and both were really sort of "men's men"—cigar-chomping, opinionated. When I say opinionated, it's different than when I say he was self-effacing. He was like Sam in that way. They'd been through the eye of the storm at a very early age, and I think it shaped their outlook and the way they dealt with life; but he was fun and funny, and fun to be around. If anybody had the right to be angry or upset that he had not been fully recognized, or deserved his own artwork back, it was him—but it didn't infuse his personality, if you know what I mean. He seemed to be somebody who was a lot more adjusted to it than even his supporters."

— Mark Hamill, interview. Hamill starred in 'The Big Red One.

Roger Ebert: Do you think as people grow older, they grow more socially conservative?
Martin Scorsese: "Not the old people I'm thinking of, the old directors like Sam Fuller or Michael Powell. They speak exactly what's on their mind, as if they're aware that they don't have any time to waste."

— '''Interview from 1993.