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«[They had a beginning: the loss of Jack and his father's reproach. They had an end, with the love reconciled between June and John. But] the middle wasn't there, ... I was nibbling around the edges. The dynamism of their attraction, the struggle, was the middle of the story. The movie was dying here.»

«The two of them have a lot in common, and I don't mean life story, ... I mean a kind of core energy.»

«John always said whoever played him, 'make sure they hold the guitar like they own it, that they don't hold it like it's a baby,' »

«All you have to do is listen over and over and over again to any one of his songs. Even when they first started appearing in the early to middle '50s, the lyrics are incredibly dark. Everyone else is singing about getting girls and being happy, and he's singing about, 'I go out on a party and look for a little fun, but I find a darkened corner, because I still miss someone.' That's a dark lyric for a pop song.»

«There are so many things that came to a head in 1968, ... It was the greatest concert of his life and resulted in one of the greatest albums of the century. A month later he proposed to June [Carter]. In the six months previous, he gets himself off drugs, and in the process he finds himself.»

«As for the Folsom Prison show, ... would anybody have the [guts] to do that show now? 50 Cent, maybe? I think the whole idea of even playing to a crowd of people like that is so politically unfavorable now - it's like, 'What are you doing, singing for these people? Do they deserve it?' There's such anger in our culture right now, that kind of grace and forgiveness, we don't see that very often.»

«Everybody had an idea about Joaquin and kind of his relationship, his darkness and the things he had done playing more cynical or dark roles, ... But this charisma when he gets behind the mike, the joy in him, the unmitigated joy you see in his face when he's watching Reese, and the love. These are things I feel we haven't seen before in his many roles.»

«I think one of the most courageous things about Joaquin in that scene is that he sounds not perfect, not at all. He's not brilliant from the get-go, but he's got so much room to grow. And we grow Johnny Cash in the movie - until, by the end, he's awesome!»

«The big thing that I wanted to do was touch on the very start of rock and roll, I loved this moment in rockabilly music. I loved the idea of people making music because they loved music and not because they saw the video or how to market themselves. A very big point for me in this movie is that John didn't arrive at Sun as the man in black. He didn't already know his marketing angle. He didn't have it worked out. He was just trying to be heard and however that would work or not work was fine, but he just needed to be heard. What was magic to me about that moment in time was that it was a moment before the term 'rock and roll star' existed.»

«I knew I wanted to make a movie about Johnny Cash since '96, but my first exposure to Cash was the live Folsom Prison album on my dad's shelf, ... I saw Cash's incredibly ravaged face with a rivulet of sweat running down his cheek on the cover. And when I listened to it, I heard all these men cheering - guys in prison. He's singing about murder and they're all cheering. There's such an incredibly rebellious attitude in that material and such danger that even as a kid it stood out to me.»