"I guess lastly is Baby Doll by Elia Kazan, where Karl Malden plays a sexually inexperienced husband, and his wife plays him for a fool, pretending to be a 12-year-old nymphette. Again it’s a very Southern Gothic, surreal, sexual perversion escapade. It’s another film I’ve watched many times and find it very hilarious."

"This Criterion set is such a loving demonstration of what careful curatorial and academic devotion can produce. Not only is the film presented in a variety of formats, there’s also a wonderful documentary by Michel Ciment called Elia Kazan: Outsider, which I would never have had the chance to see otherwise. I felt I had privileged access to this extraordinary dramatic artist."

"It’s probably as relevant today as it was at the time–maybe more so–about how anybody who’s got an opinion can become a big deal, and how dangerous that can be to them and the public. Made by a great filmmaker [Elia] Kazan, Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal were terrific in it. That last scene when he’s standing on the balcony with his applause machine yelling Patricia Neal’s name, oh man. It’s a very hard-hitting movie; I never got over it."

"My favorite movie of all time is a film by Elia Kazan called A Face in the Crowd. I just love that movie. It’s one of those films that, any time it’s on, I’m stuck. I’m literally stuck in front of the TV, watching it until it’s over. I just think it’s just a brilliant commentary. It stars Patricia Neal, Andy Griffith, Walter Matthau, and it’s this amazing look at the impact and power of television. He made this film at the end of the ’50s, and even today, it’s as relevant and as powerful and as impactful as it was fifty years ago."

"First of all, [for something to be great] there’s magnificence in every single department. Whether it’s genre, whether it’s locations, whether it’s cinematography, whether it’s performances, whether it’s script, whether it’s sound – that’s number one. I saw Lawrence of Arabia in theaters. I’d been an actor for about a year and a half; I was under contract to Elia Kazan. I went to the movie and I was absolutely blown away. But the thing that blew me away more than anything else was that the guy did that. I mean this isn’t “once upon a time;” a guy did that. A guy wrote the book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He was there, he did it, and I don’t think he ever saw 40 years old. Excuse my language, but I’ve always been quite impressed with people that got s—t done. And he got stuff done."

"The first two, I’m gonna go with Elia Kazan, ’cause they’re really the reason why I became an actor in movies. East of Eden, with James Dean, and A Streetcar Named Desire, with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. The performance by James Dean — the scene specifically where he tries to give his father, played by Raymond Massey, the money from selling the beans on his birthday, and he’s rejected — it broke my heart; it was not like anything I’d experienced before, in terms of art, and I’d seen a lot of movies at that point. I was 15, and I’d seen Bergman’s Seventh Seal and Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Welles’ Citizen Kane — great films, but when I saw Dean in that, it really put the hook in me because I felt like him and I knew then the power of film acting, and I knew then what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do to try to move people with motion pictures. So that’s why I have to put that on the list."

"I also love Elia Kazan and it was a toss up for me between On the Waterfront, which I saw as a child, and East of Eden, which I saw as a young kid, and also rediscovered as an adult. But I do remember more recently a beautiful print that was struck — maybe by UCLA archives, maybe by AFI; I’m not sure who — and they had a screening of it at a theater that’s the longer one there in Century City, beautiful theater. At one time I think it was the state of the art theater in the country, with the first reclining seats and all that. They had [screened it] somehow, in conjunction with the LA city school system and the English department of LA city schools. And I believe that the matinee that I saw was predominantly schools… And the kids have to read East of Eden or Steinbeck, Travels with Charley or something in school, and you could tell this was going to be their Steinbeck assignment, so it was a field trip. But this… wasn’t a movie for young people, and I was a little worried that the noise, the kicking of the seats, and the high jinx that were prevailing in the auditorium before the lights went down would keep going. And I remember about five minutes into the film there’s a shot of James Dean hopping a freight — he jumps this train, near Monterey and he goes to Salinas, or vice versa — he hops the train and is on his way to Monterey to visit his mother, to find his mother in a brothel. And it’s cold, it’s evening — he pulls his little sweater over his head like a hoodie and he bundles up almost in a fetal position on the top of this train, snaking it’s way through the country side in Monterey county. And the entire audience shut up and you could hear a pin drop. It was the power of a true movie star. It was the first American teenager, James Dean, on the screen. And it didn’t matter that it was a predominantly… junior high school to high school kids — they got it. They got his angst, they got his beauty, they got his rebellion, all in literally 30 seconds’ worth of him exuding teen angst in the film and it was just this great moment. It reminded me of the power of stardom, of light and shadow on the screen, of a Greta Garbo, of a great screen kiss between — God rest her soul — the late Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne in The Quiet Man, or John Travolta strutting down the sidewalk in Saturday Night Fever— it’s just this great thing. And I love that movie anyway. There’s sequences and scenes in that movie, and James Dean, his grace in that movie — I think his movement in that movie is only matched by one or two Lee Marvin performances, and maybe one or two Sean Connery performances that I’ve seen in terms of just male physical grace. Really a great film, and I had to put Kazan on my list. So Kazan would be my number five for East of Eden starring James Dean."