Sam Peckinpah made The Wild Bunch, but he would have rather made Rashomon. Sam was happy to adapt Jim Thompson’s novel. He knew it would make a good picture. It would be terrific for McQueen. And it would possibly deliver him his first hit. But he would have rather adapted Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. So since this generation of genre directors were forced to make what at the end of the day they considered silly stories about cowboys and cops and robbers, in order to make those silly stories mean something to them, they based them in metaphors that pertained to their own lives.
