I didn't want to make a movie about what we already know.

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.

That's the mythic album where you see his face, sweaty, looking dangerous, and he's there singing to murderers and robbers and sharing a good time with them. As a kid, how could you not be interested?

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.

Can't you just hire someone who sounds good?'

I had the advantage of making a movie about a man who was an artist himself, and an artist of the shadows, in the sense that he understood life's lonelinesses and life's mistakes, and that people make them. In that sense, he wasn't interested in hiding them.