Television and Cinema Verities #33

“The studios all said that westerns don’t work. I remember sitting alone and thinking: the longest enduring genre in the history of motion pictures is the western, starting with “The Great Train Robbery”, which was produced by Thomas Edison in 1903, and is considered the first narrative silent film. So all of a sudden it has fallen off the studio radar? I couldn’t understand it. Finally I came to the realization, most probably after other people, especially George Lucas, that the western is not dead. It is alive and well, and living in outer space. So I wrote a film that was about the harshness of the frontier.”

-director Peter Hyams discusses the genesis of Outland (1981) in an interview at VanDammeFan.Net.