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Guns are part of the American psyche, aren't they? This is collateral damage for having a Wild West mentality. It's intrinsic to the American psyche. It's never going to change.

I think that the Western went away for a while because part of its function was that it used to be America's action film.

The Western is as American as a film can get - there's the discovery of a frontier, the element of a showdown, revenge, and determining the best gunman. There's a certain masculinity to the Western that really appealed to me, and I've always wanted to do a Western in Hollywood.

Westerns are fun. I wish more of them would be made. When you're out there on a set, carrying a gun, riding a horse, you kind of get lost in that make believe world.

I grew up watching Westerns.

I wanted to shoot straight, mainstream, somehow off-beat. Not only realistic West, which is quite unfamiliar to the world's population - even to a lot of Americans.

Westerns was why I got into the business. I grew up on a small farm in California and all I ever wanted to do was to play gangsters and cowboys in movies.

In Canadian comedy, you'll almost never see guns. If you bring a gun into a scene, it's like, 'Whoa! Wow, how are we going to deal with that!' Guns in an American comedy are a given. Violence in America is used in a much more cavalier way.

A gun show is about like-minded people who feel as if everything has been taken away from them - jobs, money, pride.