"This is the second film on my list about a dying man, and like Hunger, it’s based on true events. Bob Fosse came to feature filmmaking by way of dance, which is entirely evident here. This film features a lot of actors dancing, dancers acting, and dancers dancing. It’s a sweaty and sexy take on the stress and fragility of the creative process. Plus, it features an early-career Jessica Lange as the Angel of Death."

"I think one of my favorite films of all time is Star 80. I’m a huge [Bob] Fosse fan, and I love that movie. There’s something about it; the music, Eric Roberts is so incredible in that movie. There’s something about the way he made that movie; it sort of lulls you into this comfortable state, and then all of a sudden it’s absolutely horrifying. It’s also kind of funny and ironic at times and winky. I just think he was a genius."

"I’m going to go with All That Jazz for number one. It’s Bob Fosse directing a movie about himself; he changed the name to Joe Gideon from Bob Fosse. So he’s directing a movie about a musical choreographer/director who takes too many pills, sleeps with too many women, drinks too much; he’s a moviemaker who’s editing a movie while he’s doing a play and having hallucinations with musicals. It’s so unbelievable how he balances it all, and it’s Roy Scheider’s best performance, I think, ever. He’s amazing in it. It is so amazing. He’s a pretty despicable guy in the movie — I mean, he sleeps around on his girlfriend — but you love him. The doctors tell him not to take his drugs, but he does it anyway, and you still love him. You don’t blame him. And it’s sort of how Bob Fosse ended up dying, so he really forecasted his own death. I mean, he even put his girlfriend in the movie as his girlfriend — Joe Gideon’s girlfriend — and then cheated on her! Like, he had his character cheat on her. It’s so f***ing unbelievable. Just brilliant. That’s number one. That would be my, I have to say, overall all-time favorite. I’m just very impressed by that movie. It’s just really, really good. It’s got like four musical numbers in there, but they’re not like Glee. Some of them are in drug-induced hallucinations, and some of them are, he’s actually directing a musical. I’ve done plays; I’ve done one musical. But the first table read, when they’re going to put up this play, it is so like the table read on plays. I recognize so many things that they get right. Yeah, that’s my all-time favorite."

"Second film: All That Jazz, Bob Fosse. It’s an incredibly hopeful, uplifting art journey and you know, on the one hand it’s about a man who is killing himself through over-work and who is over-extended and miserable and is going to die of a heart attack, and on the other hand, it’s Bob Fosse’s celebration of the fact that he didn’t die of a heart attack. He came through, and now he’s going to take the events that precipitated him into his heart attack, create a roman à clef around them, and build something magical, which he does. There’s a sort of strange and lovely honesty to it that, the first time I saw it when I was about 15/16 and it was on television, I found arresting, and it’s magic."

"All That Jazz (1979) is a perfect film, in my book: insanely well acted, incredible art direction, great writing, beautifully shot, just a director firing on all cylinders. Did I mention the amazing song-and-dance sequences? And Bob Fosse does all this, in a movie that is a very autobiographical account of his own struggle juggling: multiple productions, girls, booze, and pills; all of which lead to a series of heart attacks that culminate in the most spectacular and fantastical deathbed scene ever, with Jessica Lange as the loveliest angel of death. Forget Jaws: Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon, Fosse’s alter ego, is equal parts heroic captain and man-eating shark in this masterpiece."

"A great, great movie that was unjustly robbed of a lot of the recognition it would have gotten, but it came out in the year of amazing other movies, you know, like Apocalypse Now and a lot of other great stuff. To this date it is the most accurate portrayal of theater folk and what it’s like to produce and be part of theater. As a theater geek all my life, I was hoping that Smash would be like that, and boy it’s not. All That Jazz nailed it, just in terms of the reality of it. But again, it would go off into those fantasies that still totally worked, and worked as incredible dance numbers, but you know, were clearly fantasy numbers inside one of the most realistic portrayals of that subculture that had never been put on screen. It’s f—ing perfect. It’s just f—ing perfect. It’s great because it’s funny, it’s cynical about the theater but also clearly loves the subject matter. You know, I grew up backstage — my parents were actors — and it just captures that world absolutely incredibly accurately. Plus, it’s just a really ballsy, artistic movie from Bob Fosse in that it incorporates a lot of strange stuff, but all of it works."