Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated actor Sam Shepard doesn’t take a lot of lead film roles, but when he does, he makes them count. Take this week’s Blackthorn, the sweeping epic tale of what might have happened if - as some historians believe - legendary outlaw Butch Cassidy wasn’t gunned down by Bolivian forces in 1908, and instead went on to live a quiet, reclusive existence in that country under the pseudonym James Blackthorn.

Filmed on location in the dizzying terrain of Bolivia, Blackthorn is Shepard’s latest scenic route through the vicissitudes of American mythology, an exploration that has previously taken him as both a writer and actor through the U.S. space program ("The Right Stuff") to the moody, modern West ("Paris, Texas" and "Don’t Come Knocking") and even contemporary geopolitical intrigue ("Fair Game"). Shepard spoke with Movieline recently about his 40-year-plus journey - and his new film’s place within it.

Movieline: I’m not sure if I should tell you this — but the one and only experience I’ve had with acting was in one of your plays.

Sam: Which one?

Movieline: I was in Angel City.

Sam: Angel City! Oh, yeah. Where did you do that?

Movieline: It was at a college in Orange County. That play is obviously a pretty cynical perspective on Hollywood culture and its output, and I was curious: How would you characterize your relationship with Hollywood and the film industry in general in the 35 years since writing Angel City?

Sam: When I wrote that I was in the process of trying to make some money in Hollywood collaborating on and developing scripts, which didn’t work out at all because it was constantly board meetings with, essentially, businessmen who didn’t understand anything about writing or screenwriting or even cared about movies. All they cared about was money. Which is still the case, but back then I was kind of shocked at it. I thought maybe it was possible to function as an artist in Hollywood, somehow. When you consider all the people who’ve been duped into that belief — not excluding Bertolt Brecht, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams and all these extraordinary writers — I felt like I bought the bullet, too. I drank the Kool-Aid. [Laughs]

Movieline: Do you still maintain any connection to it at all?

Sam: I don’t do screenwriting at all for Hollywood anymore. I don’t even attempt it. In the beginning I thought it was a way I could pay the rent, and at the same time also get something done. But it was impossible. The only screenplays of mine that have been [filmed] and released that I’ve been satisfied with have been the ones with Wim Wenders, where I feel like it’s in total collaboration, and I have the confidence that it’s going to be made the way we’re conceiving it. It’s not going to be distorted into some other creature. That’s basically what I’ve enjoyed about working with Wim. But I don’t have that luxury working for any studio. And I don’t see novels as something you can adapt.

Movieline: Really?

Sam: No. I think it’s a really bad idea. It’s as bad as trying to turn old movies into Broadway plays.

Movieline: I guess "The Right Stuff" was technically nonfiction, but it just feels so novelistic.

Sam: That worked, but I think because of Phil [Kaufman] and his wife Rose. They’re kind of brilliant screenwriters themselves, and they found a way to adapt it that worked with the material.

Movieline: Also around the time you wrote Angel City, you were giving screen acting a go. "Days of Heaven" was a breakthrough, and of course that took seemingly years for Paramount to come terms with. How, if at all, did that further sour you on Hollywood?

Sam: I was very lucky to start out like that. That was virtually my first movie. I’d done a couple of other, little things, but that was my first sort of feature film. And to start off with Terry Malick, that’s not a bad way to go. But you still have the onus of producers trying to influence things — the whole oppression of people from the outside sticking their two cents in. I mean, anybody who’s going to advise Terry Malick on any aspect of filmmaking should just apologize. [Laughs]

Movieline: Do you stay in touch with Malick?

Sam: The last time I talked to him was in Austin, probably two or three years ago. I’ve kind of lost touch with him. We’ve talked on the phone a couple of times.

Movieline: Do you ever think about finding a way to work with him again?

Sam: Oh, I’d love to work with him, but that’s entirely up to him. I’d love to work with him. He seems to be off on a tangent of his own, now, though.

Movieline: Moving on to "Blackthorn", the director of this film, Mateo Gil, has professed his appreciation of Westerns as a “truly moral genre.” Do you agree?

Sam: I think the way it’s been conceived, for the most part, is moral tales, yeah. Or immoral tales. But that’s probably the stage for this. It’s also very classic in that sense, because of the scope of it. I think it’s inexhaustible, this film. You could go on and on and on. It’s like Don Quixote.

Movieline: Do you remember your very first encounter with the mythology of Butch Cassidy?

Sam: I don’t know if he was on my radar screen until that film [Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid] came out. I hadn’t paid much attention to him before that. But then I did some research for this film in Archer City, Texas, where Larry McMurtry has his warehouses full of books. That’s his hometown. And its amazing: You go into these warehouses, and they’re four times the length of this room, stacked with books kind of in a semblance of order. But anyway, he has a whole Western section, obviously, and I dug around in there and found some great research stuff on Butch. I didn’t realize he was raised Mormon in Utah. As a teenage kid he went off and kind of rustled some cattle and stole some horses and things like that. And he had this whole background that was… From the get-go, as a teenager? He wasn’t that interested in the work market, you know? He liked the adventure. And they guy he based his name on, Butch, was a rustler. And he learned to break horses from him. Do you know about it?

Movieline: Not a thing.

Sam: That whole territory up there in Utah was full of outlaws from all over the country because there was this network of caves and things like that where they could hideout and easily escape pursuit. Then things eventually got so hot for them, they eventually had to go to South America.

Movieline: Why did you want to play Butch? What brought you to "Blackthorn"?

Sam: Well, the script was by far the best script I’d seen in about 10 years. I mean, it was a great script: The way it twisted and turned, and the complexities of it, and the levels of it. It was a beautiful script. It is a beautiful script. And the fact that they were going to shoot it in Bolivia - that it was a Spanish production, not a big budget - I thought it might be unique. I thought it might be different than another American Western, particularly since they were shooting it in Bolivia. And it’s true: You get down there, and you’re in an Indian nation. It’s 70, 75 percent Indian, all the Quechuan dialects. Spanish is the second language. There were many people we were working with who didn’t speak Spanish at all. And it’s poorest country in South America.

So we’re in this very exotic territory, and there are these spectacular settings. You go from the Andes to the deepest valleys where the walls of the canyons are straight up, and then you go to the high plateau and the salt flats… The variety is just amazing.

Movieline: Had you been before?

Sam: No. I’d never been to South America before. I’d been to Central America and Mexico, but never South America. We just flew right into El Alto, which is at 15,000 feet. It’s the highest airport in the world. You come in and you go, “Boom.” You’re like a postage stamp.

Movieline: As a writer, what’s your approach to shaping your parts and your characters in other people’s scripts? How do you negotiate any changes or developments with the screenwriter or director, if at all?

Sam: I kind of have an agreement with the director ahead of time that I can fool with the language a little bit — not in terms of changing story or plot development or any big ideas, and not changing the other actors’ language. But that I can manipulate the language a little bit to where I feel comfortable with it. Beyond that, I woudn’t say I’m in the conceptual part of it at all. I try not to mess around in that territory. But the language, I will fool around with. That’s the only way I would really influence anything as a writer.

Movieline: In your career, you’ve shown a historical interest in collaborating with foreign filmmakers on stories about American mythology, psyche and landscape - guys like Antonioni, Wenders, Andrew Dominic, now Mateo Gil...

Sam:  Volker Schlondorff.

Movieline: Absolutely. What is it that keeps you returning to this interest?

Sam: Ironically, and I don’t know why it is, I think Europeans - particularly Germans, for some reason - see this country in a very, very distinctly… I wouldn’t want to call it “objective.” It may even be more romantic. But they see America in a way that Americans don’t see it. Maybe because we’re submerged in it and tend to polarize ourselves. But the German sensibility about America has a scope to it that’s so different. Like Paris, Texas, for instance. I don’t think Paris, Texas would have been the same film had it been done by Robert Altman or whoever. I don’t think it would have had the exile feeling that Paris, Texas had - the remoteness of it. I really think it’s the exile kind of thing. I don’t know what it is about the Germans. Maybe it’s because of World War II; maybe they feel exiled from their own country. America is regarded as the savior of the second World War, and they look to America as being some sort of contemporary brother. And they don’t quite find it, but they feel like… I don’t know. I might just be making all this shit up. But I think Wim has a certain tenderness for America that’s unique.

Wim said, “Well, why don’t we call it Paris, Texas?” I said, “Great!” [Laughs] “Call it anything you want! Just keep it in Texas!”

Movieline: And you’ve seen it develop over the years in multiple collaborations with him. Aside from the films themselves, how do you think you’ve factored into Wenders’s attitudes? What do you guys talk about it in that context?

Sam: With both of those films - "Paris, Texas" and "Don’t Come Knocking", we had a lot of discussions about place. He had, for years, this obsession with a Dashiell Hammett book called "Red Harvest" that he wanted to do a long, long time ago, and somehow it got hung up. But "Red Harvest" is set in Butte, Mont., and so he had this thing about Butte. I said, “Well, let’s make this movie in Butte!” Because in both the instances of "Paris, Texas" and "Don’t Come Knocking", he started with a totally different idea about characters. But both of them converged around the idea of place. First, he wanted to shoot Paris, Texas all over the world. I said, “Why don’t you just locate it in West Texas? Do it strictly as a Texas movie?” Wim said, “Well, why don’t we call it Paris, Texas?” I said, “Great!” [Laughs] “Call it anything you want! Just keep it in Texas!”

And it was very difficult, because many times, Wim wants to have many, many, many characters. "Don’t Come Knocking" must have had twice as many characters when we started, and we kept trying to condense it and make it more focused. So it’s things like that.

Movieline: We’re in a period where a lot of your peers and contemporaries are coming out with memoirs and other material, giving the last half-century a cultural perspective that we didn’t have before. How do you intend, if at all, to add your own last half-century to that perspective?

Sam: I’m not interested in autobiography at all.

Movieline: You’re not going to do that?

Sam: No. Never. I mean, in a way, all the plays have been autobiographical, but not confessional like that. I’ve never read an autobiography where the protagonist isn’t the hero of his story. It’s ridiculous.

Movieline: Is that intellectually dishonest?

Sam: No, no. I’m just not interested in it. There’s nothing dishonest about it. It’s just that I don’t want to pursue it as a thing.

Movieline: So what is next?

Sam: I have a three-act play that I’ve got the skeleton of; it’s not committed to a theater for another year or so, so I have plenty of time to work on it. I’ve got another play that I’m working on. I’m going to do a film with Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon in Arkansas.

Movieline: Oh, right - "Mud".

Sam: You know about it?

Movieline: Just what’s been announced. That director, Jeff Nichols, is awesome.

Sam: What’s his name?

Movieline: Jeff Nichols? Have you seen "Take Shelter"?

Sam: No, I haven’t.

Movieline: Oh, man. Well…

Sam: He’s from Arkansas, right?

Movieline: Right. Then he attended North Carolina School of the Arts, where he got hooked up with Michael Shannon. Then they made "Shotgun Stories" and "Take Shelter".

Sam: I talked to him on the phone. Sadly not much idea about his work.

Movieline: He’s brilliant.

Sam: Well, good.

Movieline: And what a cast.

Sam: It’s a beautiful script. As a screenwriter, he’s quite talented. It’s kind of an impeccable script. [Pause] But I’m doing a lot of other stuff. I’m working at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico with a bunch of scientists in a kind of think-tank situation, which has been very productive.

Movieline: Isn’t Valerie Plame at the Santa Fe Institute? Is that how you wound up in playing her father in "Fair Game"?

Sam: No, it was actually the other way around. She and Cormac McCarthy, who I’ve known for a long time, recommended me for this fellowship out there — the Miller Fellowship. I did that a year ago, for six months, and then I was invited back as a kind of resident. It’s without any stipend or anything, but they give me a place to work. And I really liked that somehow it’s time for me to be institutionalized. [Laughs] So far it’s worked out good, and I want to continue it as long as I’m productive. I’ve got my farm in Kentucky, but sometime it gets a little bit remote, and I wonder what I’m doing. New Mexico feels like home to me now.