Sam Shepard
Sam Shepard
Samuel Shepard Rogers III, known professionally as Sam Shepard, is an American playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director, whose body of work spans over half a century. He is the author of forty-four plays as well as several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs. Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth5 November 1943
CountryUnited States of America
I've been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.
My son, Walker, has a band called The Dust Busters. You know, he plays banjo, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin, so a lot of my interest in that kind of music comes from him constantly listening to this stuff. He's taught me the history of it. It's remarkable how these young kids are now turned on to more traditional old-time music.
I think a part of the reason that those early plays were short was that I just kept having these ideas, and I'd just go off and write them. I wasn't trying to write one-act plays - it's just how the ideas would be expressed. Every condition I was in seemed like it could be a play.
I never considered myself a movie star, and I didn't want to become a movie star, because as soon as you do, you throw away that possibility of playing character. You really do. All of a sudden you're just an entity, you know?
Ive been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.
To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing.
When I first started, I didn't really know how to structure a play. I could write dialogue, but I just sort of failed beyond that, and kind of went wherever I wanted to go.
I've come to feel that if I can't make something happen in under an hour and a half, it's not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play.
Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play.
You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.
For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.
Ideas emerge from plays, not the other way around.
The thing about American writers is that, as a group, they get stuck in the same idea: that we're a continent and the world falls away after us. And it's just nonsense.
Sometimes in someone's gestures you can notice how a parent is somehow inhabiting that person without there being any awareness of that. Sometimes you can look at your hand and see your father.