"You get 12 years of childhood, give or take. These days, maybe less. The movies I loved during that time have been well documented in other conversations, and they’re all the same as yours. Back To The Future remains the best movie I ever saw. Star Wars, ET, Indiana Jones, Die Hard, like everyone else. But Pete’s Dragon, though it may not entirely hold up to scrutiny now, was the movie that taught me how to be. I saw Elliott as a model for how to treat other people. He was generous and warm, but mostly seemed driven by the needs of whoever required him most. I’ve always been someone with a small circle of friends. Each stretch of my life has been defined by one person who was just my person. We became inseparable for a certain number of years, and that time was our season, just the two of us making our way through life. This was before my wife took the mantle, never to be relinquished. I had a similar dynamic with all of them — I wanted us to have so much fun, they’d consider their lives a little better for having been friends. Like Elliott."

"Enter the Dragon was powerful to me because it was like watching a superhero come to life. I’d never seen anything like Bruce Lee, and that movie changed my life, because it made me believe that a man can actually do these extraordinary things physically, and he was a great actor. He had great facial expressions, and he’s also had a big impact in some of my choices as a film performer, certainly not in terms of my style of movement — nobody can move like him — but in some of the facial expressions. If you look at the end of Face/Off, when I shoot the Castor Troy character with the harpoon, my face goes through all these expressions. That was direct steal from Bruce Lee when he jumped on a guy and killed him with his feet. In fact, I went through that slow-motion shot rather recently with Mandy. I stole from Bruce Lee’s facial expressions when he breaks the guy’s neck and the camera goes right into his eyes and he’s got that very ferocious, wide-eyed look. He passed, and I put that in the picture."