Daily Inspiration Quote by Lawrence Kasdan

Kasdan is pitching the Western as Hollywood's most flexible blank page: a genre that looks like it has rules, but is really defined by absence. The landscape is "important" because it does the work of myth-making. An empty horizon doesn’t just set a scene; it creates moral space. Strip away institutions, dense communities, and social surveillance, and you’re left with characters forced into clarity. Choices look starker when the nearest town is miles away and the law is a rumor.

The shrewd move is the Shakespeare claim. Kasdan isn’t flattering the cowboy so much as defending the genre against its own reputation as simplistic. Shakespeare’s plots are engines of jealousy, ambition, kinship, betrayal - human pressures that don’t require castles, just stakes. The Western, in his framing, is a delivery system: take King Lear’s family implosion, drain it of court etiquette, and you get a ranch patriarch dividing land; turn Macbeth into a territorial grab with a gun belt. The terrain becomes the stage, the silence becomes the soliloquy.

There’s also a producer’s subtext: "only you populate it" is a statement about control. Westerns offer clean production logic (clear geography, archetypes, visual storytelling) and clean narrative authority. You can build a world from scratch, then smuggle in anything - tragedy, romance, politics - under the respectable cover of genre. Kasdan, coming out of the New Hollywood moment and helping shape the 80s blockbuster era, is arguing for the Western not as nostalgia, but as a chassis for adult drama when the industry prefers familiar packaging.