"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."

"I hadn’t seen Sideways in a number of years, and recently saw it again, and sat down with it and was overwhelmed at how much more meaningful it had become in the years since I had seen it. I don’t know why – I guess it’s just really cheesy: Like wine, it had aged for me. (I’d take that out, that was so cheesy!). But it had matured for me as a story, or perhaps I had grownup to meet the story – it was so lyrical and so authentic in every moment. Stories about failure, to me, are more meaningful as I get older. That movie also swings big, and that’s another thing that I like about it. That monologue, Virginia Madsen’s monologue… it’s just achingly romantic. [And] the end, where he drives up, sort of mirroring The Graduate, but it’s Dustin Hoffman, the loser version, which is way closer to me than the heroic version in The Graduate. [The movie] just keeps curving into itself, and out of itself, and it’s just an incredibly satisfying, enjoyable, meditative movie. It’s got some incredible performances – everyone is a delight, everyone is just incredibly fun, and each scene has something interesting happening in it. [Sandra Oh] was another inspired bit of casting. Her mother, and the kid, and she’s amazing, and the motorcycle helmet rage was one of the most terrifying things I’ve seen on film – and a flopping penis, that’s always good."

"I think it’s probably one of the most inspirational movies for me because of Paul Newman‘s performance. I think that is, to me, some of the best, [most] controlled acting in a movie. I think that he has this incredible likability. Even though he’s a drunk, washed-up lawyer, you’re still rooting for him from the very beginning. I’m that sort of weird guy who will watch a movie almost every day if I can. It’s harder when you’re working on the show. I buy a lot of movies on used DVD so I can have certain scenes. I was really looking for things to inspire me. When I got out of college I was waiting tables professionally [and] couldn’t afford to go the theater [every] night. I think those great movies can actually make you feel a certain way. Not only emotionally, but if you’re in this business, it’s one of those things where you see someone do something that good and it buys you a year of energy. That’s what I was really looking for. It sounds so cliché,[but I wanted] to bask in the glow some of these amazing performances, like [those of] Dustin Hoffman and Marlon Brando. But it was also fun. To get back to what I was saying before, that 1970s raw energy, it’s almost frustrating now that people aren’t making more movies like that because people won’t go see them. Even Away We Go is, in a way, a tribute to the 1970s movies, too, but more of the Hal Ashby thing. Again, I don’t think people are making movies like this, so for Sam to do it is incredibly cool. And the fact that my name’s on the poster is totally surreal."