One of the few truisms about Sam Shepard is that he has always been more difficult to know as a person, in the public sense, than he has been as a dramatist, as a writer, or as a performer. There has always been something vaguely punk rock about Shepard’s work—a visceral directness coupled with the sense of never quite knowing what to expect or what he’ll do next—that has made it feel as instantly powerful and iconic as he himself has seemed eternally elusive. It’s a mix of qualities that has helped transform Shepard into a kind of mystical cult figure for teenagers who happen upon plays like Cowboy Mouth (which he co-wrote with Patti Smith in 1971) or "Buried Child" or "Fool For Love", only to later discover that the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who emerged from the experimental theater milieu of New York City in the 1970s is also an actor and a revelatory one at that, who has brought a striking physical presence and contemplative air to a swath of films as diverse as Terrence Malick’s "Days of Heaven", Philip Kaufman’s "The Right Stuff ", and Sean Penn’s "The Pledge" or vice versa.

Over the course of the last four-plus decades, Shepard has been astounding prolific, having written more than 40 plays, published six books of prose and poetry, acted in more than 40 films, and lent his hand to a range of screenplays, including the scripts for Michelangelo Antonioni’s "Zabriskie Point" and Wim Wenders’s "Paris, Texas". This month, though, he steps into his first starring role in more than six years in Mateo Gil’s elegantly restrained new Western, "Blackthorn", in which Shepard plays perhaps the most punk-rock cowboy of them all, Butch Cassidy, in an evocative re-imagining of what happened after the Wild West’s most notorious outlaw set off for Bolivia on the run from the American authorities in the early 1900s.

Interview magazine caught up via phone with Shepard, who was in Boise, Idaho, for a reading of "Ages of the Moon" that he was scheduled to do that evening with his 'Right Stuff' co-star Scott Glenn, and had stationed himself at a local bed and breakfast.

Q: You once said it first occurred to you to become an actor when you saw Burt Lancaster in "Vera Cruz". Was there ever an equivalent experience that sparked the idea of becoming writer?

Sam: Oddly enough, it was reading Eugene O’Neill. I’d read "Long Day’s Journey Into Night", and I remember seeing Sidney Lumet’s black-and-white film adaptation, which I still think is one of the best adaptations of anything of a book, of a play, ever done. It’s a beautiful little thing. But I remember being struck by the idea that it was a play, so I read the play and I read about O’Neill, and in an odd way, there was something that I connected with there . . . There was something wrong with the family. There was a demonic thing going on that nobody could put their finger on, but everybody knew the ship was sinking. Everybody was going down, and nobody knew why or how, and they were all taking desperate measures to stay afloat. So I thought there was something about that that felt similar to my own background, and I felt I could maybe write some version of that.

Q:  Had you been writing plays before you saw "Long Day’s Journey Into Night"?

Sam: No. When I first started, I didn’t really know how to structure a play. I could write dialogue, but I just sort of failed beyond that, and kind of went wherever I wanted to go, which is how I ended up with these shorter pieces. I didn’t venture into two-acts or three-acts until, I think, "La Turista". So these things I was writing were all experiments of just tiptoeing into the waters of what it’s like to write a play. What kind of shocked me was that theater seemed so far behind the other art forms, like jazz or Abstract Expressionism in painting or what they called “happenings” and the other kinds of experimentations that were taking place at that time. Theater still seemed to have this stilted, old-fashioned quality about it. So I couldn’t quite understand why theater, as a form, was spinning its wheels and not really going anywhere. Writers like LeRoi Jones . . . What’s his name now? Amiri Baraka . . . But back then he was LeRoi Jones, and he wrote some brilliant plays like "The Toilet" and "Slave Ship". I think he was the most brilliant playwright of his era. And yet he was being overlooked as well. I don’t know what it was . . . It’s hard to say that it was because of the racial stuff . . . I thought his plays were far and away above anything else that was going on, even though there were other people struggling to do that sort of experimental work.

I got to know LeRoi Jones, or Amiri Baraka, a little bit, and he was always sort of wary of me . . . But I thought he was a brilliant fucking writer in prose and poetry as well. He’s overlooked in the scheme of things. He was angry . . . He was pissed. When I first met him, he was running around with an attaché case and a raincoat and was sort of neatly coifed and stuff. Then all of the sudden, he transformed into this revolutionary.

Q: Edward Albee wrote in 1965 about one of your plays where he praised your “unencumbered spontaneity.” I guess that became an early trademark, this feeling that you just kind of dashed off these plays and they were produced almost as quickly as you wrote them. But then you started to shift gears and think about bigger structures.

Sam: Yeah. I don’t know why that happened exactly except that the stuff just started to demand a bigger format. I guess the first real encounter I had with stretching it out was "Curse of the Starving Class". In a way, it was the first sort of venture into writing about family, and it seemed to have more longevity. Then that morphed into "Buried Child" and some other stuff.

Q: When you first started up in New York, was there anyone who was a particular accomplice or guide or a friend who helped shape the work you would make?

Sam: Well, Charles Mingus Jr. was a great friend of mine. I went to high school with him, and he was always close to me, but then our friendship got distorted and warped because of his . . . Hell, I hate to say paranoia, but I started to feel as if the influence I was getting from him was more and more negative. I didn’t quite know how to handle it, so I broke off the friendship. But he definitely had an influence on me, and so did his father and all of the jazz musicians around that scene, because I felt like jazz was really the art form of that decade. I don’t know what it was about that music, but when you saw it live, there was something deeply glowing about it. The way those musicians presented themselves on stage, like [John] Coltrane and Eric Dolphy and Charles Mingus and Roland Kirk . . . They were the heroes of that era. I still find it hard to believe that the whole era of jazz is over. It seemed like such an active force in the 1960s, a real expression of the times—and, of course, it was essentially black and angry. [laughs] I mean, when you saw Nina Simone singing at the piano, she was like a warrior - and a tyrant. When she sang the “Pirate Jenny” song, the hair on your neck stood up.

Q:  You were working at the Village Gate as a busboy. Were there other clubs, too?

Sam: I also worked uptown, at the Oak Room. One of the great piano players, Mary Lou Williams, played at the horseshoe bar. It was Duke Ellington’s favorite place for dinner. He’d come in every night with his entourage and his family and sit down in this huge booth. I remember bussing his table many nights. Sir Duke. [laughs] It was kind of awesome.

Q: What was your sense of identity as an artist at that point? Were you just biding your time?

Sam: No, I mean, I was writing all the time, so I wasn’t waiting for anything. I think a part of the reason that those early plays were short was that I just kept having these ideas and I’d just go off and write them. I wasn’t trying to write one-act plays. It’s just how the ideas would be expressed. Every condition I was in seemed like it could be a play. Everything seemed like a possible play. It was also a bit scary. I mean, people talk about the 1960s in a nostalgic way, but to me it was terrifying. People were getting assassinated. There was Vietnam. There were race riots. It felt like everything was going to get blown up sky-high. It didn’t feel like flower power. It felt like Armageddon.