"My number two movie is Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of Murder starring Jimmy Stewart — one of my favorite James Stewart performances. He’s the country lawyer, so all those folksy tricks that Jimmy Stewart uses just really come into play here– ’cause he’s also so bright, you know? He’s the brilliant, folksy country lawyer. And Lee Remick is in it, in the flower of her youth. Bra-less and in Ray-Bans — you know, who doesn’t want [to see] that? And gosh, Ben Gazzara in a really neurotic, strange performance. I think it’s the screen debut of George C. Scott as the young lawyer from Lansing, MI, who takes on this case; and he’s — it’s just brilliant courtroom stuff. Murray Hamilton — who plays the mayor in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws — he’s the bartender, and he’s wonderful; it’s a great turn. And the music: Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, so it’s a great jazz score. The Jimmy Stewart character tinkles on the ivories and he plays a little bit of jazz sometimes as a kind of hobby, so that justifies the score. But that’s a great film — black and white, beautifully shot, underrated. Almost a perfect film."

"When I first saw Brazil in the late ’80s, it hit me like a truck. It was such a powerful, bold vision, so joyous in its escapism and so crushing in its ultimate nihilism, that it left my teenage mind in tatters. I wasn’t quite sure what I’d watched but knew it was unlike anything I’d seen before. The impressive (and somewhat sad) fact is that, decades later, I still haven’t seen anything quite like Brazil. It escaped from Terry Gilliam’s brain with such velocity that its power even today is undeniable. I showed it at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles in January of this year, and it still confounded me. I asked Terry Gilliam if he would write a quick intro for me to read out before the screening. This was it: Brazil was made by a bunch of young people who didn’t know any better. They are older and wiser now, but it seems America isn’t. It’s a pity that George W. and Dick Cheney aren’t still running the show. I was tempted to sue them for the illegal and unauthorized remake of Brazil. Just think . . . more people are living my movie than ever went to see it."

"George Washington, probably, David Gordon Green’s first movie. That was one that I probably saw right before I started, or was it… I can’t remember — it might have been right before I wrote this film. I had never really seen kids articulated in the way that it felt like kids actually thought. It wasn’t imbuing the kids with a sort of ability to articulate themselves that was beyond them. There’s that amazing monologue when one of the boys is sitting on the floor of a bathroom and he’s looking up, and he’s saying, “I want to be an inventor. I want to make stuff,” and he’s giving this monologue about his wants and his needs, but they’re so through the prism of a young mind. You can tell the speeches he’s heard that he thinks he might be making, but in that dishonesty it’s so honest. He’s reaching for things beyond himself, and you feel that he doesn’t have the faculties to get there, and that’s just so honest of what that time is. You can feel that he really gave a lot of this sort of articulated authorship over to the kid and that really shows. It’s like, “Oh, this is actually how kids speak.”