If I had to pick one person, it would be the late filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, the most complicated, contradictory, and self-destructively creative person I’ve ever known.

I first went to see The Wild Bunch at Chicago’s State-Lake Theater in the summer of 1969 — four years out of Colgate and still in search of a career. Instantly recognizing the work of an original American artist whose medium was motion pictures, it altered the course of my life. On the recommendation of Colgate art professor and my mentor, the late Eric Ryan, I applied to film school at Northwestern University, eventually leading to a career as a screenwriter.

At the end of The Ballad of Cable Hogue, as Cable (Jason Robards) lies dying, the Reverend Joshua Douglas Sloan (David Warner) delivers a remarkable eulogy that concludes with: “He lived and died in the desert, and hell will never be too hot for him.” Hence, for my dinner with Peckinpah, we would meet at El Compadre, the Mexican restaurant on Sunset Boulevard famous for its flaming margaritas. He has four before our food arrives.

Thus properly lubricated, Peckinpah begins by discussing Aristotle’s Poetics, then moves on to the works of Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan, and James Dickey, with Pirandello, Chekov, and Brecht thrown in. I ask him if there are any films he regrets not making? He speaks wistfully of Malcolm Lowery’s Under the Volcano, the tale of an alcoholic British consul in Mexico on the Day of the Dead that was filmed by kindred spirit John Huston in 1984 (ironically the year Peckinpah died at 59). “I would have given anything to have directed it. That was my story.”

I ask him what he misses most, and he comments on how difficult it is to get roast wild boar, a dish that reminds him of the studio executives he fought with throughout his career.

Always abrasive and uncompromising, difficult and demanding, Peckinpah was a visionary who had the ability to stare into the fire and capture on film what he found there. While it’s been suggested he had a death wish, the truth is he simply lived himself to death. Fortunately, the genius of his work lives on.

— Garner Simmons ’65 is the author of Peckinpah: A Portrait in Montage — The Definitive Edition (2019). He’s spoken widely on Peckinpah’s films, in addition to providing audio commentary on the majority of them. An English major at Colgate, Simmons has worked in TV and film as a writer, producer, and director.