"A city deserves an auteur. A director laureate. New York has Scorsese. Paris has Truffaut. Madrid has Almodovar. I mean, Omaha has Alexander Payne. Los Angeles has Tarantino…"

"For a comedy, I’d say probably Election you know? Frickin’ Alexander Payne, dude? Come on. Yeah, Matthew Broderick, Reese Witherspoon? So good. The perfect blend of real and absurd. Completely buyable characters… just turned up a couple notches. And these completely realistic scenarios and situations just turned up just a couple notches. Complete believable absurdity. It’s not just over the top."

"I’m very proud of my movie, Nebraska. I don’t really know what a great film is. I don’t know what the ingredients should be. But I certainly think Nebraska is a credit to the industry of filmmaking and it’s done very, very well. And both he [director Alexander Payne] and Quentin [Tarantino, with whom Dern has worked three times] can make a f–king movie, trust me. Alexander said to me the first morning, “Do you see anything here, you’ve never seen before?” I went looking around – we were in Nebraska in some little town in the middle of October, cold, freezing – and I said, “Yes I do.” I said, “It seems like everybody here is putting their oar in before 8am.” And he said, “Well hopefully, that’s because we have 91 crew members here and 78 have worked every day on every film I’ve ever made.” He put his hand on my shoulder and he said, “So you, sir, can go take a risk.” And he said, “This is Phedon Papamichael; he’s your cameraman.” I met him the day before. And he said, “I wonder if you’d do something for Phedon and I, that we’re not sure you ever did in your career.” I said, “Well what’s that?” And he said, “Never show us anything. Let us find it.” And I knew for the first time in my life I had a partner. Al Pacino came up to me — I’d never met him — at a party and said, “You know, I’ve not seen your movie yet, Nebraska. But everybody back at the Actors Studio – ’cause we’re both members – is talking about your performance.” So Brad Grey is at the party, and he ran Paramount then, and I said, “You know, Al Pacino has not got a screener,” ’cause it was Christmas time. So he said, “Tell him he’ll have one tomorrow morning with his newspaper.” At noon the next day my phone rings and I pick it up and he says, “Bruce, Al Pacino.” I said, “Oh wow.” He said nothing for about 10 seconds, and then he said, “How did you do that?” I told him what Alexander told me about “let us find it.” And he said, “I have tears in my eyes, because you knew you had a partner. I’ve never had a partner.” He said, “Bruce, I never ever saw the work. You were just the character.” And that’s the greatest compliment to me I ever had."

"We’re back to opera, we haven’t left it — because Magnolia. If you think about the moment Keanu wakes up as a battery, the moment Lana Turner loses it in traffic and is in this insane hysteria of flashing lights that is completely unrealistic, and then you look at the moment where it’s raining frogs. I saw it, and was like, “Is this going to be one of those movies that I don’t like where he looks down on every one?” I think Alexander Payne and Todd Solondz are super talented, but sometimes I don’t want to sit through their movies because the bile is just unbearable. I didn’t really know PT Anderson’s work that well, or what was going to happen. And then, it turns out he loves people so hard that it rains frogs. There is actual opera in this one. Oh, and BT-dubs, there is a musical number. The license and the observation and the amount that he went for it. The craft and his ability to sustain that much — any one of these movies could have fallen into a puddle of pretension, but the mastery behind them meant that they never could. Jason Robards, who happens to be in two of the movies on this list, him actually dying of actual cancer playing a guy dying of cancer, giving that speech. And Tom Cruise giving the best performance he’ll ever give. It just felt so achingly, weirdly logical to me."

"[Anything in Ashby’s] body of work is always recognizably him, but it’s pretty elastic. Like Being There is very different than Shampoo in a lot of ways. There’s a little bit of the surreal that can enter in, but at the same time, they’re very grounded and very of their time, and have a certain gritty feel to them. They’re not so clean. There’s a naturalism there that he marries with some very bold moves and even magical realism. [The Landlord] is this movie that not too many people have seen, didn’t have a big release originally, and it’s hard to find on DVD, and doesn’t have the reputation of Harold and Maude and Coming Home. But I kind of think it might be his best movie. Maybe it’s just because it’s so screamingly brave in a lot of ways, and it hits so many issues. There’s so few American movies that touch on class, and this just comes straight at you like a train, talking about class issues, race. [It’s about] this young man who’s born into privilege, struggling with his place. “He is to the manor born,” you know? He has money in his blood, and he can afford to go buy a building where people are living. Just a young man, Beau Bridges, and it’s probably my favorite thing I’ve ever seen Beau Bridges do, too. It’s sort of startling to see him in this role as the golden boy, and you can almost see Jeff Bridges playing it, too. And the fact that this white guy, automatically, just by the color of his skin and the place he was born and the family he was born into, has the ability to be responsible for the lives of all of these far less fortunate or privileged people. [He struggles] with that sense of responsibility and [tries] to reject it and give up that control, but [also] do right by these people. I don’t know, it’s so complex. But [Ashby’s] not afraid to have some very broad comic moments. You know, there’s a few people who can do it since. Like Alexander Payne or David O. Russell, a few other people whose work you can see owe a lot to Ashby."