"Drama John Cassavetes style—aggressive and docu-cool. Handheld and shot in black and white (by Haskell Wexler), it had a great impact on the audience, and on me and my windup Bolex as I tried to figure out how to shoot a scene. Great storytelling."

"It’s quite interesting how a film like this can work so well. The acting style is so uptight, but Kubrick creates such curiosity for the images and the structure and the narrative—I don’t know how he did it. I’ve rewatched it many times. There’s one scene that inspired the monkey imitation scene in The Square. A boy is taking his kid brother into the room where his mom is playing the cembalo. He’s wearing these wooden shoes, violating the strict etiquette of the room, and they start to fight. They actually used handheld cameras for that scene. When you think of Barry Lyndon, you don’t think of handheld cameras!"

"The granddaddy of them all. A landmark achievement in technical innovation, social awareness, and sheer terror. The handheld look so many filmmakers use today was very new in the ’60s, when visual styles were very “locked down.” It was my first experience watching someone get disemboweled, and you don’t easily forget that."