"What can be said about this movie that hasn’t already been said? Mike Nichols’s masterpiece precipitated the sixties youth movement in all its melancholic glory while also being a hilarious satire of contemporary consumer culture. My brother Jim has always been an early adopter of movie technology. The first Criterion release I ever remember seeing was the Graduate laserdisc in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen (we had seen the film previously only on a pan-and-scan VHS borrowed from our local library). It has one of the first commentary tracks I ever heard on a disc (maybe the first), by film scholar Howard Suber. I learned a lot about film analysis listening to that track in 1987. But the new Blu-ray also features one of Nichols’s many commentaries in conversation with the great Steven Soderbergh. They have done several together (Catch-22 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and they are never less than fully engaging and fascinating. When making my own film, I took to heart Nichols’s assertion that “a movie is about something, but it is also about something else.” And in this new transfer, The Graduate has never looked or sounded better. Robert Surtees’s brilliant compositions are a touchstone of modern cinema. Often imitated, never duplicated. By casting Dustin Hoffman, Nichols also flipped the idea of what a leading man was and could be, and changed the history of cinema."

"This is extremely gloomy music, but an absolutely brilliant album. I first heard it in the 80s. It was the kind of thing I always listened to at the end of the day, when you're a bit pissed and in bed and have probably smoked a bit more weed than you should have done. It's such a powerful record. It's got so many different moods in it and it takes you from melancholy to sheer triumph, in a way. The journey along the way, and the performance of Mark Hollis, is so moving, and I think the other musicians on board have great empathy for that and it all fits into place. It really does sound like they were all sat in the studio and said okay, we're all really good at this, let's do something that makes that obvious. And I think it does. I knew Ed Hollis, Mark Hollis's brother, because he came in and produced 'Love Song' for The Damned. And of course we knew him because he was the manager of Eddie & The Hot Rods, so we were already in the loop. But I didn't really bother with Talk Talk until this record came out and someone said have you heard this? And it just immediately resonated. I thought oh, I like this; I want more of it. Now I find I have to be in the right mood to listen to it; reflective, you might say."

"Let’s do Preston Sturges and the greatest comedy of all. This film hasn’t aged a day from 1941 when it came out; it’s amazing — especially with Hollywood in mind. It’s the ultimate inside Hollywood movie. It’s about a guy searching for meaning in his art who’s had all this success in Hollywood… The human dynamics of it are very true to life. I mean, it’s a comedy and it’s all pitched at that point, but Preston Sturges was such the master of dialogue and delivery that the whole tone and pitch of it is totally unique. It’s amazingly contemporary. This character’s desires and the timeless subject of, say, art versus commerce is one of the best film depictions of that you could ever find — and in a very comedic way. He has a project that the studio doesn’t want him to make about homelessness — this is coming out of the Depression — and he’s a spoiled rich guy and he has a project he wants to make. Of course, the Coens made a film with that name, O Brother, Where Art Thou? That’s where that comes from. And it’s kind of a ridiculous desire to say something that has social significance and meaning about suffering and all that stuff, but he’s really kind of desperate to make a comedy. He ends up on a chain gang by a series of misadventures… So he really is suffering. It’s just a brilliant movie and surprisingly contemporary."

"In terms of mind-blowing experiences, I would say the first film was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, just because I think — I’m pretty sure — that’s the first time I ever saw a live action movie in a movie theater as a kid. My dad took me and my brother to see it. I think up till then I’d only seen one animated movie in a movie theater. I think it was Robin Hood, which, for some reason, was really boring to me. But we went to see Willy Wonka, and I was so blown away, and it so freaked me out, that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for years. I had watched movies on TV and stuff, but that was the first time I think I was old enough to go to the movies, and be able to sit through a movie without wanting to get up and run around the theater. Just seeing it that big and getting sucked into it. I don’t even think I realized those were actors and that anything was fake. I think I just thought it was all real, that Charlie was a real kid, and Willy Wonka was a real person. I really think I thought it was real. I really thought the whole family lived in that one room. I was probably in second grade or something… So I probably didn’t actually think it was real, but I responded to it like it was real."