The iconic playwright-actor discusses the effect he has on women, his Oscarphobia, and why he’s an agent’s nightmare.

Q: In The Accidental Husband you play the father of Uma Thurman’s character. He’s very calm and wry and low-key—a lot like your own dad?

A: Uh, no. Wrong. He was a bit of a maniac. I think down the road he actually went off the deep end. But that’s a whole ’nother legend.

Q: There’s sort of an inside joke in The Accidental Husband, in that your character’s girlfriend turns out to be Brooke Adams, who played your accidental wife in 1978’s Days of Heaven.

A: Right, right. It’s crazy. I think I ran into her once in the whole time since Days of Heaven, and it was backstage at a Broadway show somewhere. I haven’t had any contact with her. Wonderful gal, though. It’s crazy, you know. Time is just nuts.

Q: What did you two talk about when you first saw each other on the set?

A: Well, obviously, the time that’s elapsed, and what she’s been doin’ and all that. It’s like your whole life passes. The same thing with Patti Smith. With Patti, I hadn’t seen her for probably, god, 25 or 30 years, and then all of a sudden we bang into each other in New York and we start doing stuff together again.

Q: I was just listening to Patti Smith’s cover version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” You play the banjo on that, right?

A: Actually it was a six-string guitjo I was playing—it’s a banjo body, but guitar strings. And my son was playing traditional banjo along with John Cohen from the New Lost City Ramblers. It was quite an amalgamation. You know, I hate to say it, but I’d never really heard the song before, and Patti brought it up, and I love it. It’s an incredible piece of music—and incredible lyrics, too. I never really studied on it, you know, because I guess it was out of my generation or somethin’, but it’s a fantastic song. It’s very esoteric, in a way.

Q: You and Patti were a very close pair in the early seventies. Did she lead you in certain creative directions?

A: Yeah, she had a tremendous influence on me, because I was unaware, at that time, of any of these French poets, the symbolist poets and all that stuff, and she kind of turned me on to Baudelaire and Rimbaud and all those poets that I never paid any attention to, bein’ a dumb-ass American out in the middle of nowhere. I wasn’t nearly as well-read as she was. I’d knocked around American literature, but certainly not the Europeans. Essentially Patti was a poet back then. She hadn’t really broken into music. I’m certainly not responsible for it, but I kept tellin’ her, you know, that she should sing this stuff. She was doin’ poetry readings and stuff at St. Mark’s Church, and she was kind of performing these poetry readings as though they were songs, and I said, “Why don’t you sing ’em?” So I got her a guitar, and she learned a couple chords, and she started singin’.

Q: So you bought her the guitar, huh?

A: Yeah, I bought that old Gibson that she’s got. Yeah. It was a pawn-shop guitar. Back then I don’t think I paid more than 40, 50 bucks for it. Now it’s worth several thousand.

Q: So when you got off the bus from Southern California to New York City, had you been there, before?

A: Never. No. Had never been east of the Mississippi.

Q: What was your first day in New York like?

A: I got off the Greyhound in Times Square and I don’t think I had more than 15 cents on me, so I saw this little place that said, “Five dollars for blood.” And I went in there and did a blood donation and got five bucks and went out and bought a hamburger. That was the first thing I did.

Q: The fact that you didn’t receive an extended formal education in writing—has that been an advantage to you?

A: In some ways yes, because I’ve been able to explore a lot of writing that I’m not sure I would’ve gone into if I’d been educated in it—if it had been introduced to me through a class or a teacher or a scholar, I’m not sure I’d have the same sense of attachment that I do now. Because I feel like the writers that I’m drawn to, the writers that I really cling to, are the writers who seem to be writing out of a desperate act. It’s like their writing is part of a survival kit. Those are the writers that I just absolutely cherish and carry with me everywhere I go. Because their writing means more to them than just puttin’ out a book. It’s somethin’ that has to do with their survival. Those are the guys I’m not sure I would’ve discovered, had I been in a literature class. Maybe that’s not true. But I feel like I discovered them on my own. It’s a long list, but Beckett would probably be at the top of it. And César Vallejo. Borges. There’s a ton of ‘em.

Q: How old were you when Beckett’s Waiting for Godot famously fell into your hands?

A: Let’s see, I was probably about 17, 18—something like that. I’d never seen anything quite like it. I’d literally never seen anything on the page like it.

Q: Nothing that even looked like it.

A: Yeah. Exactly. I said, “What is this?” And then I kept looking at it and kept looking at it, and read it over and over and over again, and it was definitely a spur, you know? I didn’t want to imitate it at all. It had nothing to do with imitation. But it felt as though it gave me license to go ahead and try something on my own.

Q: When you were nominated for Best Supporting Actor for "The Right Stuff" in 1984, you didn’t attend the Oscars. Why is that?

A: It was too many people. I’ve never felt great in crowds, and certainly not when they’re puttin’ the spotlight on you like that.

Q: Your acting career was taking off at the time. Were you getting lots of offers?

A: Yeah. I turned a lot of stuff down. I still mainly considered myself a playwright at that point, and I just felt like, if I start doin’ this stuff and become a quote-unquote movie star, it’s really going to be difficult to have anybody take my writing seriously. So I kind of backed away from it.

Q: What did you turn down?

A: Oh, well, I guess the most notorious one was "Lonesome Dove". And then the big Clint Eastwood Western, "Unforgiven".

Q: You passed that up?

A: Yeah. I’m not even sure why, now. Then there was another one called "Big" that Tom Hanks did. And Warren Beatty’s "Reds". Stuff like that. But I couldn’t see myself doin’ it.

Q: Your agent must’ve wanted to kill you.

A: She did, yeah.

Q: When I mention your name to women, they actually moan. Are you aware of this reaction?

A: Ha! That’s very flattering. No, the first thing is, if women do have that response, they always try to hide it. That’s the last thing in the world they’re going to reveal. I mean, I wouldn’t mind if there was some revelation of it, but it’s not the case. So you really don’t get that much perk out of it.

Q: You’re 64. Is writing harder now or easier?

A: Both. Once I get into it, there’s something more accessible about it now. But it’s tougher to begin now—to really begin, and to really commit. I think you have more doubts about what’s valuable, I guess.

Q: Because particularly back in your early days you were spitting out a flurry of one-acts…

A: Yeah, you didn’t give a shit. Just go. Just go. The great New York poet Frank O’Hara, he said you go on guts. That’s what he said. You go on guts. That’s what you feel like when you’re that age. But now it’s like it’s like you go on terror! You’re terrified. It’s still guts, but it’s a different deal.

Q: What’s else has changed as you’ve gotten older?

A: Well, I notice I’m a little slower getting up on a horse. Fishin’ in a river, sometimes I get out of breath and I’m a little more tentative about getting into deep water. The physical
limitations—your balance isn’t as strong as it used to be, you can’t jump fences.

Q: Could you jump fences before?

A: Oh, yeah. You know, you just vault ’em.

Q: What do you rely on when you’re writing?

A: I go between two typewriters. The one that I’ve got now that’s just a monster is this little IBM Selectric from back in the seventies—that electric ball thing. It’s just a monster. I mean, it’s extremely fast, extremely sensitive and accurate, and it feels good. And then I’ve got a little Hermès portable that I like very much, and I take that on the road. You’ve really got to slam on that one, whereas the electric one is very fast. But I basically go from the handwritten notebooks to these other two deals. You know how it is if you’re a guitar player and you’ve got a great old Gibson? The instrument feels good and you feel good playin’ it.

Q: So you don’t use a computer for writing?

A: Never. Never. I don’t touch it. I don’t go anywhere near it. I mean, everybody around me knows about it, but I’ve turned my back on it.

Q: Do you e-mail?

A: No. Don’t need to. It’s a complete hype. It’s not a necessity. Why do I need e-mail?

Q: You need it for the same reason you’d need heroin.

A: Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I knew a lot of junkies growin’ up. But you don’t need that.

Q: You captured fraternal friction so perfectly in the play "True West" with its two sparring brothers, Austin and Lee that I was surprised to learn that you don’t have a brother.

A: Right. I mean, basically they’re the same person. It’s just a split. I just wrote ’em as two characters, but they’re basically two conflicting parts of one person. So it’s very easy to do that without—you don’t need a brother. You’ve got your own brother.

Q: Speaking of which, you were known as Steve Rogers growing up in Duarte, California, but when you came to New York City in 1963, you switched your name to Sam Shepard.

A: If you remember, back in the old days there was a Steve Rogers who was Captain America—that was his alter ego, right? And I always thought, I don’t want to be carrying around the name of a cartoon hero. Actually, my legitimate name is Samuel Shepard Rogers, so I just shortened it to Sam Shepard and dropped the Rogers. I just kind of invented it.

Q: Do you ever feel as though there’s a Steve Rogers still out in the Mojave, living an alternate life?

A: Spinnin’ his wheels. Yeah. I’m sure there is.