"OK, but guess what? It doesn’t matter that you’re Australian. You need to watch it, because you’ll be completely sucked in. First of all, it’s Gene Hackman. Need I say more? Gene Hackman is the best American actor living today, in my view. And it is a sports story, but it’s so much more. It’s about an underdog team and beating the odds. It’s about teamwork. And I am a basketball fan, but I will tell you that before I was a basketball fan, I was a fan of Hoosiers. That’s why I’m saying I think you should watch it, because you’ll really, really enjoy it. Dennis Hopper kills it. It’s heartbreaking, his performance. And there’s a scene at the beginning of Hoosiers — it’s going to sound crazy, but Gene Hackman is driving and he’s drinking from a takeaway cup of coffee, and the way he’s drinking the coffee is so real and so authentic. He just gives an accurate… such appreciation for every gesture… every movement of that man."

"Wes Anderson shines here with his own style, sense of humor, and great use of music. A killer cast. The scene where Gene Hackman and Anjelica Huston are arguing on the street has so much underlying love in it. I’ve never seen anything like that between two actors—saying one thing and creating the opposite feeling."

"I mean, it’s like a massive, big epic, that is all from Richard Harris, Morgan Freeman, and Clint Eastwood. And that ending is incredible, and it starts with Gene Hackman going, “Death’s got nothing to do with it.” It’s just brilliant. “Fat man, get out of the way.” “Who owns this s–t hole?” I mean, it’s wonderful. And highly quotable."

"I can guarantee you this film isn’t on anyone else’s list. It stars Gene Hackman and it’s made by my favorite British film director, even more than Nick Park. He’s a guy named Nick Roeg, and he’s most famous, probably, for Don’t Look Now. Eureka is the film that probably ended his American career. I think it was a disaster when it was released. The first half of this movie is as good as you’ll ever get in a movie. It’s about a guy who discovers, literally, liquid gold. He becomes the richest man in the world and the man who has everything and the man who has nothing. The second half of the film is a trial and takes place in a courtroom and that part doesn’t work as well, which is what probably led to it being a flop, but the first half is as good as it gets. And I love Nick Roeg. He’s idiosyncratic, highly individual and yet for a ten year period he was working in the studio system with big stars like Gene Hackman. Hackman’s never been better. People say “Hackman” and think of The Conversation but he’s never better than he is in Eureka. If you can imagine a man who has everything and he (Hackman) just plays it as a guy who has nothing."

"""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…"