"Apocalypse Now. I would ordinarily say The Conversation, because it was so ahead of its time, but Apocalypse Now — another masterpiece. Also, a lot of these movies would never be made today. But — I’m leaving out Scorsese, I’m leaving out David Fincher; you know, I’m leaving out some of the great Europeans. I’m leaving out 100, or a 1000 movies that we could talk about. I’ve been a fan of Chris Nolan’s since I saw his black-and-white film, Following. I saw that movie in Paris years and years ago and I thought, “We’re gonna hear from this guy, this is an amazing talent.” I’m glad people really recognized it early enough to support him. There are so many other movies we could talk about. There are at least five David Leans. There are at least five Fellinis. Five Viscontis. John Ford. John Huston. Minelli. And Kubrick! I didn’t say Kubrick! I should be thrown out of film for that. It’s really hard. I don’t know how you do it."

"All right, Stanley Kubrick was a genius, the master of the big, ambitious film that stuns the senses, like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Paths of Glory is one of the last great triumphs of black-and-white filmmaking. It is also a tribute to the talent of Kirk Douglas, who here takes on the role of a French colonel in the trenches of the First World War with such explosive energy that one realizes how many films (and directors) were unworthy of Kirk’s genius as an actor—his first acting role, by the way, was onstage as the servant in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, with Catherine Cornell, Judith Anderson, and my mother as the sisters and Ruth Gordon as the dreadful sister-in-law. Nobody has ever captured the First World War better on film (except perhaps for Jean Renoir in Grand Illusion, which is in a class by itself). A heartbreaking giant of a film, not a bad shot or a wasted frame in it; perfect filmmaking."