James Mangold Oh Quotations

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.

John was not just a singer, but a songwriter, ... He was always riding this river of shadows in his writing. He was singing about a kind of pain everyone lives through.

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.

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.

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.

They were each an antidote for the other. John had a hole in his heart... and June was an antidote... John was a real ambassador for her to the edge or away from a safe place as part of the first family of country music. It's the most wonderful set of opposites you could ever encounter.

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

I think one of the most courageous things about Joaquin in that scene is that he sounds not perfect, not at all. He's not brilliant from the get-go, but he's got so much room to grow. And we grow Johnny Cash in the movie - until, by the end, he's awesome!

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.

I knew I wanted to make a movie about Johnny Cash since '96, but my first exposure to Cash was the live Folsom Prison album on my dad's shelf, ... I saw Cash's incredibly ravaged face with a rivulet of sweat running down his cheek on the cover. And when I listened to it, I heard all these men cheering - guys in prison. He's singing about murder and they're all cheering. There's such an incredibly rebellious attitude in that material and such danger that even as a kid it stood out to me.

John always said whoever played him, 'make sure they hold the guitar like they own it, that they don't hold it like it's a baby,'