"Ivan the Terrible, Part 1. Sergei M. Eisenstein. Mainly because he shot it during the middle of the second world war, and he had thousands of extras to choose from. It was one of those movies made during, of course, the second world war. Stalin had absolute power, which means that they could literally do anything with this production. Their production was epic on a scale that’s never been seen before because they were using — sort of very freely — prisoners of war for these big scenes. But the end result is the film is an extraordinary interpretation of what Ivan the Terrible, Part 1, is. It’s extraordinary for a myriad of different reasons, but one of those reasons is it was made during the second world war, and you can see aspects of it that we don’t really see about the world at that time. Do you know what I mean? Eisenstein was very cleverly able to mirror Stalin, mirror Hitler, within the confines of that film — disguising it, of course,as Russian folklore to get the movie made. In fact, he probably sold it to Stalin like, “You are as great as Ivan the Terrible was!”Of course he was, but terrible also. It was a great way of being able to reflect the politics, the situation of Europe, the situation of the world at that time within the confines of the film. It’s a great film. Magnificent. His use of individualizing on individual characters is mind blowing. I’m sure every great director has studied it for weeks and weeks, months and months at a time in their lives."

"Potemkin is taught in film schools worldwide, more like a fossil than a real, breathing animal that must be dissected. Watch it because it’s important. So budding filmmakers are taught about formalism and montage, and they rarely get to watch Eisenstein’s later works, like Ivan the Terrible. They’re missing out: imagine a biopic run through the meat grinder of German expressionism, with every image connoting the pitfalls of absolute power, with cutaways of faces that are thankfully forever captured in celluloid marble, with a sense of mounting state paranoia and ever-crumbling artifice. Potemkin may have the classic scenes, like the dish, the lion, the guns, but Ivan has taken all those early lessons and boyhood feints and given us a masterpiece."

"I’d probably have to throw in the Sergei Bondarchuk War and Peace from the ’60s. I remember seeing that with my step-dad when I was about 15. The scale of it and the kind of dramatic style of old, expressionistic use of the camera, that led me then to look at things like Ivan the Terrible. I just thought they were amazing. No one’s quite touched it since. When you look at it, the only thing that’s dated is probably the font they used for the titles — it sort of says it’s a bit ’60s, but the rest of it you just go, “Wow, this guy played Pierre as well as directing it.” And there’s not one CGI soldier, you know: they’ve literally got 50,000 troops in the back of shot."