"""t’s a movie where I have to stay there, just to get to the bit where Gene Hackman creeps up behind the bigot in the barbers and takes the cut-throat from the barber’s hand and continues the shave. The story is such a big and important story. I was asked recently, along with dozens of other people, to pick one film, by the BFI, to mark the 75th birthday of the British Film Institute. Which film would you leave for succeeding generations? There are many great art films but I chose Mississippi Burning because I figured that I would try to be responsible. I thought I could either be hip or responsible, and actually stick to the brief, and by succeeding generations, I assumed they meant the youth, young people, and I thought: “What’s the biggest issue in the world?” Apart from the way that drugs fuck everybody up, racism is the biggest thing. The newspaper is basically the story of what racism does, whether it’s religious prejudices, or tribal prejudices, or colour prejudice or whatever the fuck it is, but I think it’s the single most destructive element in our world and Mississippi Burning is a beautiful story of great courage. It shows individual and collective courage in that area, about people who took it on in a landmark situation and started to make great change possible. It’s got one of the great cinema performances of all time, not that I’m given to superlatives, despite it being the second time I’ve said that, which is Gene Hackman. I could watch Gene Hackman all day long; he’s one of the people I most admire"

"One more. Let’s go with Clint Eastwood’s movie Unforgiven. I think that’s a brilliant movie. The acting in it is totally brilliant. I’ve always been a big Gene Hackman fan, but who isn’t? I love Eastwood and Morgan Freeman in it. Richard Harris is hilarious. I think the movie has an unbelievable sense of myth, and a great sense of undoing that myth. I’ve never been in a movie theater where I had that experience where the end of the movie, you have the hero say, “Yeah, I’ve killed women and children. I’m gonna kill you.”"

"The Firm, which was a film that I got a chance to be in, and got a chance to work with Sydney [Pollack] and really rub shoulders with Gene Hackman for the first time. Well, actually, I had been with Gene in Mississippi Burning. But I got to work with Gene Hackman and Tom Cruise and Holly Hunter and Gary Busey and Wilford Brimley. But Sydney Pollack had a great career as a director and I always admired his approach to things. Jeanne Tripplehorn was in The Firm also, did a great job as Tom’s wife. I love the music in The Firm. Dave Grusin wrote the music. I thought the film was very well put together, and when you take a novel, sometimes the film doesn’t match up, and I thought The Firm did match up. I read the novel and was very impressed with the scary Nordic guy who was sort of shadowing Tom Cruise’s character throughout the novel. He was just scary. And then, I’d say it was a year or two years later that my agents got a call from Pollack. I think he knew my work from the Actor’s Studio in New York, because Sydney was always very involved with the studio, and I think he was also a fan of Mississippi Burning and had seen that film. That took its own wings, and he just offered the role of the Nordic, and I thought, “Wow, that’d be great.” So I got to go to Memphis, Tennessee, the home of rock ‘n’ roll."

"The Royal Tenenbaums is a mood masterpiece. Everything about Wes Anderson’s film is perfect; it immediately transports you to a world only he could create. Part Salinger, part idealized New York, but mostly Wes’ pleasantly devastating view of this family’s life, Tenenbaums succeeds on great writing and extremely particular filmmaking. Put this together with a score and a soundtrack for the ages, and you have a film that operates like the best of Hal Ashby or even a filmmaker like Miyazaki. It feels so good, it’s almost like a drug. Also, the Rolling Stones have never been used better in film history, and that’s just one of the movie’s many wonderful marriages of music and cinema. And then there’s Gene Hackman…"

"The seemingly precious whimsy of Wes Anderson’s style masks a sensibility that is at once delicate and magnificently imaginative. The Royal Tenenbaums has been described as an adaptation of a great novel that doesn’t exist, and it is set in an upper Upper West Side that also doesn’t exist. Anderson literally creates a world of his own to explore the most primal emotions and family dynamics. There is so much to savor—the sweat suits, the enchanting music, Gene Hackman on a tricycle—and the DVD is also a world of its own, as beautifully packaged as, well, a Wes Anderson film, with Kent Jones’s lucid manifesto defining Anderson’s particular brand of genius, and a great gallery of production design drawings."