"I remember one time, Robert Altman asked me what I thought the greatest movie that I had ever seen was, and I said Citizen Kane. Bob correctly said “Oh bulls–t, everybody says [in mocking voice] ‘Citizen Kane, Citizen Kane.’ Do you really feel that?” And I went, “No, not really.” [laughs] He said, “Give me an honest answer,” and I said Treasure of Sierra Madre. He thought for a minute and he said, “I can’t believe you said that. That is, for my money, the most perfect film ever made.” And I said “Why?” He said it was because “There’s not one frame that I would cut from it, or one frame I would add to it.”"

"I was at NYU film school when I first saw If…. The second time was the very next day, when I brought friends and classmates to share this extraordinary movie experience. I have always harbored fantasies of blowing up my high school, but until If…. I never realized that I was not the only one. Obviously If…. was a huge influence on Rock ’n’ Roll High School. In the mid-1980s, I wrote an article about high school movies for American Film magazine in which I opined that If…. was the greatest of them all. A month later, I received a lovely letter from Lindsay Anderson, my hero (I also love O Lucky Man!). We corresponded for several years, finally meeting at the Telluride Film Festival. He called me “a movie brat typical of my generation” for preferring The Searchers to She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. (I treasure his criticism.) Wrapped in a scarf, Malcolm McDowell is as riveting and charismatic as ever in his screen debut. I showed the movie to my teenage daughters, who only know Malcolm as Linderman on Heroes, and it impressed a whole new generation of rebellious teens. If….’s DVD extras, especially “O Lucky Malcolm,” really capture the spirit of the man and the movie."