The whole underside of our society has always been violence and still is. Churches, laws--everybody seems to think that man is a noble savage. But he… - Sam Peckinpah

We've all grown up with the idea that gunning a man down is just fun and games. All of us, as kids, played cops and robbers, with toy pistols or pointing a finger at somebody and saying, "Bang, Bang. You're dead!" Both the movies and television have perpetuated the idea that shooting a man is clean and quick and simple, and when he falls down there is only a small hole, or a blood-stain, to show how he died. Well, killing a man isn't clean and quick and simple. It's bloody and awful. And maybe if enough people come to realize that shooting somebody isn't just fun and games maybe we'll get somewhere about violence on the screen in the first place. [...] No, I don't like violence. In fact, when I look at the film myself, I find it unbearable. I don't think I'll be able to see it again for five years.

I did this one script for that turned down--said it was a piece of shit! I knew it was one of the best things I'd written, so I took it back and reworked it and at Four Star bought it as a pilot for . Dick Powell was really a fine gentleman and the eagle behind Four Star's success; he helped me a great deal. I didn't direct the first Rifleman; did that. I just wrote it. I did direct four of them before I left, however. The first one I directed I also wrote, called "The Marshal." It was the episode that brought in as the reformed drunk who became the marshal--a part he played for five years.

I walked from the series because Jules Levy and that group had taken over my initial concept and perverted it into pap. They wouldn't let Johnny grow up; they refused to let it be the story of a boy who grows to manhood learning what it's all about.