"""With Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, I have to stay there. I don’t know how people can act that quick. I’m a big fan of quick acting, and i’m going to try to build it into my career from now on – I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. I think in the old days, everybody used to act really quickly because Hollywood was built by theatre people. And I don’t believe that cinema is a non-verbal medium, I believe people should have t-shirts made with, “Cinema is a not a non-verbal medium,” because I don’t know how that entered the language – it’s from people who can’t write presumably. I don’t believe that, in some way, having a theatrical background should exclude you from the movies, which was a fashionable thing in the 1970s. It’s ludicrous given that Hollywood is built by mostly European theatre people. You can’t speak any quicker than Cary Grant speaks in most of his movies – it’s really cool – and everybody gets everything, nothing misses. I love to watch those two together, because they’re dry, they’re witty, they’re fuuny and it’s romantic, and they get together in the end. I’d have said The Godfather, because it is one of the greatest films ever made, but it’s too obvious! I also like to watch Sign of the Times with Prince, because he does the splits whilst playing the guitar and comes back up on the backbeat, and anyone who can do that is good enough for me. Also The Last Detail, with Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid, which is a marvellous movie, and all those 70s movies like Dog Day Afternoon with the young Al Pacino. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. The Servant with James Fox and Dirk Bogarde is another great English film, that if you want to see two halves of the 60s British films, check out Performance with James Fox and check out Le Serpent with James Fox, and then you get a pretty good idea; both ends of the spectrum."

"""t’s a movie where I have to stay there, just to get to the bit where Gene Hackman creeps up behind the bigot in the barbers and takes the cut-throat from the barber’s hand and continues the shave. The story is such a big and important story. I was asked recently, along with dozens of other people, to pick one film, by the BFI, to mark the 75th birthday of the British Film Institute. Which film would you leave for succeeding generations? There are many great art films but I chose Mississippi Burning because I figured that I would try to be responsible. I thought I could either be hip or responsible, and actually stick to the brief, and by succeeding generations, I assumed they meant the youth, young people, and I thought: “What’s the biggest issue in the world?” Apart from the way that drugs fuck everybody up, racism is the biggest thing. The newspaper is basically the story of what racism does, whether it’s religious prejudices, or tribal prejudices, or colour prejudice or whatever the fuck it is, but I think it’s the single most destructive element in our world and Mississippi Burning is a beautiful story of great courage. It shows individual and collective courage in that area, about people who took it on in a landmark situation and started to make great change possible. It’s got one of the great cinema performances of all time, not that I’m given to superlatives, despite it being the second time I’ve said that, which is Gene Hackman. I could watch Gene Hackman all day long; he’s one of the people I most admire"