"My parents took me to see it in a re-release — it came out in the ’60s and they re-released it in the early ’70s — and I was only seven years old, so it totally blew my mind. My parents, I think, were just completely bored and baffled by it, but I was obsessed with it. It stuck in my head, and every time it came on television I would watch it, and I saw it again in the theater as a teenager; I would go to see it whenever they revived it. It was just a movie I’ve watched a lot. I think part of the reason is…when I was a kid, I didn’t know what to make of it. It was so unlike what I’d been exposed to on TV, or by watching Disney films in the theater. It was so fascinating to me. It has a really unique status, which is in my mind like a big Hollywood epic movie about esoteric ideas — which had never really happened before that, and I don’t think it’s going to happen again. No one would ever spend that kind of money on a movie that big, and with that scope, and be that strange and slow and oblique and unexplained. Some people, of course, think it’s incredibly pretentious; I think the ideas in it are really fascinating. That Kubrick meticulousness is incredible. But part of what makes it a great movie, I think, is that as it proceeds it turns into this really intimate kind of horror-thriller — with HAL — and when I think, “Who’s a great writer who wrote in that style?,” I think Edgar Allan Poe in outer space. It becomes this real, psychological, bizarre, unexplainable thing about a murdering supercomputer! Those are some of the most handsome, greatest, cinematic scenes I’ve ever seen, so the fact that it was attached to this esoteric thing… To me, it works on so many levels. And the design, and the use of music…there’s nothing else quite like it."

"Going in a little different direction, Apocalypse Now is an unbelievable piece of cinema. Just the scale of the production and the performances. I feel like, narratively, it’s one of the… There’s a subgenre of Vietnam movies, obviously, and this one just feels so epic and operatic, in no small part because it uses Wagner’s Ring Cycle as the score for one of the great battle scenes. I don’t know, I can’t say enough about it. And then, of course, seeing Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about it. That just made me love it even more, because you can see the creative depth that Coppola went to, the depth of his soul that he dug into to not just make the movie and keep it together, but to sort of fight for coherence in a chaotic production, and I love the discovery. I mean, clearly, when Brando showed up on set, it was such a disaster, because he didn’t know his lines and he was a hundred pounds overweight or something, and he basically refused to learn his lines. But then Coppola worked with what he had, and to me that is the most… He wound up with something genius and more coherent than what may have even been on the page originally. There’s a quote by Orson Welles that the absence of limitations is the enemy of art, and I feel like Apocalypse Now is a kind of great tribute to that idea, because Coppola just faced so much adversity making the movie. Not just Coppola, the cast, the crew, everybody faced so much and dealt with so much and then created this transcendent piece of cinema that captures a dark piece of world conflict history and some very intimate stories of young people sucked into it, and then, of course, a meditation on the darkness of the human soul, which is an important thing to explore artistically from time to time."