James Mangold People Quotations

The big thing that I wanted to do was touch on the very start of rock and roll, I loved this moment in rockabilly music. I loved the idea of people making music because they loved music and not because they saw the video or how to market themselves. A very big point for me in this movie is that John didn't arrive at Sun as the man in black. He didn't already know his marketing angle. He didn't have it worked out. He was just trying to be heard and however that would work or not work was fine, but he just needed to be heard. What was magic to me about that moment in time was that it was a moment before the term 'rock and roll star' existed.

He was much more concerned about protecting others than himself. The thing he would always say to me was, 'I don't care if I look bad. Just don't make other, innocent people look bad, because they were my mistakes.'

June and John are the last generation who can sing about these things first hand, ... The fact is, these people grew up in a field and they were singing about what they saw.

It was unbelievably hard to get this done, ... Over the years, Johnny understood. He was patient beyond belief. I'd tell him that people are frightened of musical films, but even more so they're frightened of movies that require the talent to be successful in order for the film to be successful. It's much easier to make a comic book.

As we got to know John and June, what we needed them to understand was that the people they were now was not the people they were then, ... And there was the challenge of combining the grand wisdom and spirituality of these elder legends backwards into the young people they were, as they were learning those lessons. To tell how they got to be here, we had to go to those darker places, and not temper it.

People don't remember how good the music was (back then)... There's some real blood and guts in that music.

I remember being real concerned about the music and singing -- that's something we were both concerned about -- and Jim said if people want to hear Johnny Cash, they can get a Johnny Cash record, he's made a few.

I had the advantage of making a movie about a man who was an artist himself, and an artist of the shadows, in the sense that he understood life's lonelinesses and life's mistakes, and that people make them. In that sense, he wasn't interested in hiding them.

There was something really adventurous going on at that moment with young people lashing out.

I'm really very lucky. I get to do an awful lot. I've been able to make an incredibly wide range of movies and work with an incredible array of people.

As for the Folsom Prison show, ... would anybody have the guts to do that show now 50 Cent, maybe I think the whole idea of even playing to a crowd of people like that is so politically unfavorable now - it's like, 'What are you doing, singing for these people Do they deserve it' There's such anger in our culture right now, that kind of grace and forgiveness, we don't see that very often.

When I was making 'Cop Land' in 1996, people were asking what my next movie was, ... Without thinking, I said, 'I want to make a movie about Johnny Cash.'Ã