James Gray

"Oh God, yes. Cheers. It teaches you that the camera is a weapon that can be deployed brilliantly. What is beautiful about I Am Cuba is that, as showy as it is, it’s not style for no point. It’s an expansive vision of the rot that we brought to Cuba. Whether you agree with its politics or not, it’s not really the issue; it’s really human, and you understand… Well, a poet wrote it. Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote it. You understand the humanity of the people in it. Whether they are subject to humiliation, or to the humiliation of capitalism, well, that’s almost secondary to their own inner lives. The movie validates their inner lives, and the camera is a weapon in doing so. Beautiful."

"Unique, truly frightening. A troubling film that lingers in the mind."

"An astonishing visual spectacle. Unmatched."

"Melancholy and affecting and strange and brooding and heartfelt."

"Contains perhaps the most remarkable and imaginative musical number of all time: "Lullaby of Broadway". Busby Berkeley, a true visionary."

"John Ford. John Wayne. And amazingly modern in its approach."

"One more. Let’s go with Clint Eastwood’s movie Unforgiven. I think that’s a brilliant movie. The acting in it is totally brilliant. I’ve always been a big Gene Hackman fan, but who isn’t? I love Eastwood and Morgan Freeman in it. Richard Harris is hilarious. I think the movie has an unbelievable sense of myth, and a great sense of undoing that myth. I’ve never been in a movie theater where I had that experience where the end of the movie, you have the hero say, “Yeah, I’ve killed women and children. I’m gonna kill you.”"

"Scarlet Empress, with Marlene Dietrich, directed by Josef von Sternberg. That’s also pre-Code, just barely, I think, and it’s the greatest of their collaborations. Morocco is amazing, too, and I love Blue Angel. Morocco has that incredible ending where she can’t resist but follows him off, and you hear the wind sound and all that. Anyway, Scarlet Empress is so singular; there’s nothing like it. It’s almost like a new cinema is being created; he’s creating a new language for cinema. Not just the way that it looks, but the light, the use of light, and the use of production design becomes, almost, a sensory part of the experience and informs her character. It’s all about her character’s sensuality, and he uses all these other elements beyond just herself to sell that. The way the film looks, the way the film feels, and it’s where the style completely informs her identity, which is an amazing idea."