"What the fuck does this woman—she’s a brilliant director by the way, I love her work, previous work—but what the fuck does this woman from down there, New Zealand, know about the American west?"

"And why in the fuck does she shoot this movie in New Zealand and call it Montana and say, ‘This is the way it was.’ That fucking rubbed me the wrong way, pal. And the myth is that they were, you know, these macho men out there with the cattle.... I just come from fucking Texas where I was hanging out with families.... Not men, but families—big, long, extended, multiple-generation families that made their living, and their lives were all about being cowboys. And, boy, when I fucking saw [Power of the Dog] , I thought, ‘What the fuck? Where are we in this world today?'... I mean, Cumberbatch never got out of his fucking chaps!"

Said Sam Elliott, on Marc Maron's podcast, quoted in "Sam Elliott Proclaims ‘Power of the Dog’ a ‘Piece of Sh-t’/The veteran actor is not a fan of Jane Campion’s Oscar-nominated cowboy movie" (L.A. Magazine).

Elliott complained about the "allusions to homosexuality throughout the fucking movie," and Marc Maron suggested "that’s what the movie’s about." And, really, why can't a cowboy movie be about anything? I guess it's irritating to see excessive honoring of a movie that's in your genre and made by an outsider to that milieu. But why can't that be the artistic leverage, the filmmaker's outsiderdom?