"I begin and end with road-trip movies. Easy Rider was a cultural phenomenon. It depicted the rise of hippie culture, condemned the establishment, harkened back to a mythical America that was being shot in the head metaphorically, and many people, including my own father, so identified with the main characters, Captain America and Billy, that they sought to emulate the values not only of the film but of the filmmakers, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. I wrote about the transformative power Easy Rider had in my life in my book, I Blame Dennis Hopper, and let me tell you, the first time I saw it on TV, all cut up, I thought: This is the movie that ruined our lives and turned us into dirty hippies? I just didn’t get it. The years went by; I became an actress, worked with Dennis Hopper, then Peter Fonda, deemed them both mystics, and thought: Yeah, I need to reinvestigate this film. So cue up the sixties soundtrack: Get your motor running . . . Easy Rider is mainly a road-trip movie about two alienated and rootless hippie bikers who travel on their choppers to make a drug deal, but somewhere along the broken road, Hopper and Fonda reveal themselves in an existential way. For instance, there’s a touching bit of autobiographical improv about the death of Fonda’s mother that Hopper apparently made him shoot. Watching Easy Rider, you never forget that Peter Fonda is the son of Henry Fonda—and that’s pretty existential too! It’s like he’s cinematically rebelling against the very American roles his father played—especially Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. Which, if you think about it, is also a road-trip movie about a broken America. Apparently, Henry Fonda came out of Easy Rider not understanding any of it. I’ve always loved the idea that while Peter was shooting Easy Rider and changing the world, Henry was shooting Yours, Mine and Ours, a Hollywood generation-gap movie, with Lucille Ball. Hopper had his finger on the pulse of the times when he made this film, and not just the peace movement. He came out of the studio system, acting in films like Giant and Rebel Without a Cause, and starred in countless television shows. His work as a director and an actor has been overshadowed by his wild lifestyle, and that’s a shame. Two films you should check out: Hoosiers, in which Hopper acted, and Colors, which he directed. Hopper literally began the independent film movement with this film. He probably also cursed us with hundreds of road-trip movies too—but here is the original. The tagline of Easy Rider was “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere . . .,” and that message still resonates, especially in the character of George Hanson, played so beautifully by Jack Nicholson. Let’s just say the casting of Nicholson as an alcoholic ACLU lawyer was a stroke of luck and genius. His performance opposite Hopper and Fonda, maybe because they were all buddies, is the heart of the film. Every road movie owes a debt to this scene, because every road movie since then seems to have a bonding scene like it, where all the characters reveal their inner hopes, fears, and dreams over a joint or two. They sit around the campfire smoking pot, and Hopper rationalizes that people hate him because he has long hair and is a hippie. Nicholson says, no, they hate you because you’re free. Cut to the thousands of folks who saw this film, quit their jobs, and became hippies! Easy Rider represented a time when freedom meant freedom from material things, freedom from driving in six lanes of traffic to work twelve hours a day at a job you hate. Freedom in 1969 was the land, the land of the free and the brave. Freedom was peace and love. The word freedom has been co-opted. Today, freedom means freedom to be selfish, freedom to carry guns. Freedom to hurt the land and its inhabitants for the sake of commerce. Easy Rider reminds us how far we have strayed from that journey."

"Well, I think one thing is I love seeing the 15th century in black and white, in the 20th century. The physical imagery… that scene in the balloon at the beginning of the movie, the way that it’s cut together and the way that it functions and what he’s looking at. The sound, the music. Tarkovsky is one of my favorite directors and I think there’s just a great abstract quality in his films, where you see something and, as you’re looking at it, it transforms in front of your eyes. Things happen that you can’t believe you’re looking at — a horse falling down a flight of stairs; all of a sudden there’s a moment where you’ve got Christ, in the snow, carrying his cross up a hill. The kind of subliminal violence that occurs — when this guy gouges the eyes out of one of those journeymen, artisans that are leaving the reconstruction of a church; the apathy in the violence reminds me of the W.H. Auden poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts.” The old masters, they really knew about human suffering. And I guess in that particular film, what I’m thinking about is the length of the takes, and the surprise of what you actually see being filmed. The way slow motion is used in that movie also; the way that movies are not like that anymore. The scale and the depth of field of what you’re seeing is vast. So there’s a poetic quality to that. I’d have to mention The Passenger also, because there’s a moment when Antonioni has Jack Nicholson sticking his arms outside of a cable car, and for that moment you just have this sense of observing observation — that’s a big part of moviemaking to me, or painting. That kind of filmmaking, where the camera is still but everything around it is moving, and moving at different speeds, is something that I’m attracted to."

"""I could go on forever with the list, so I just picked five random ones, because I go through periods where I watch certain movies a lot. I don’t know why — I’ll get on a kick. I’ve been on a kick lately of watching Dracula, the 1931 version with Bela Lugosi, over and over and over and over. You know? I love everything from the ’30s. The 1930s is my absolute favorite time period for horror movies, because they were just so demented and sick. Sometimes you watch them and go, “Wow, they get away with a lot.” Then, of course, the codes came in and it ruined the party. When you watch movies from the 1940s, they seem so tame and so dry, but everything from the ’30s is just amazing. Lugosi in that film is so iconic, he doesn’t even seem like an actor giving a performance. Some of these people transcend to something else. It’s like Marilyn Monroe or something. They became something else. Sometimes people will make fun of his performance because of his accent, but he’s so… It’s so funny. I love watching him, because his performances are so unique. Sometimes there’s other people in the film — like David Manners, who’s like the lead, good-looking guy, and he’s so wooden and so 1930s-stiff acting, and Lugosi seems like Brando. You can see he’s so in it that when they yelled, “Cut!,” he didn’t cut. You can just see it. He’s so committed that his performance is funny, because it’s on such another level from anyone else in the film. Everybody in those movies back then, you watch them and it’s just — it’s that feeling like, “Eh, you know, even though they’re supposed to be boyfriend/girlfriend, husband/wife, they don’t [seem] like they’re having sex or something.” Lugosi seems like he wants to f— everything in the movie constantly. He just has that vibe. Really weird, man. You know? He does, essentially, I guess. Yeah, he does. He’s just not tame. I don’t know, maybe because he was Hungarian or whatever, he just has a different way of approaching, but he does not have that “uptight American actor from the ’30s” vibe at all. He just steals every moment. Not just him; Dwight Frye as Renfield is amazing. It’s funny — actors seem like they don’t want to do these types of movies, but as soon as you play a villain in something that’s like a horror movie, that’s what you’re going to be remembered for. Even if Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar for whatever — Remains of the Day or Howard’s End or I can’t even remember what it was — he’s Hannibal Lecter. Doesn’t matter if Jack Nicholson won an Oscar for Cuckoo’s Nest or whatever; he’s Jack Torrance. It’s so funny, these roles are just so — they stick."""

"""With Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, I have to stay there. I don’t know how people can act that quick. I’m a big fan of quick acting, and i’m going to try to build it into my career from now on – I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. I think in the old days, everybody used to act really quickly because Hollywood was built by theatre people. And I don’t believe that cinema is a non-verbal medium, I believe people should have t-shirts made with, “Cinema is a not a non-verbal medium,” because I don’t know how that entered the language – it’s from people who can’t write presumably. I don’t believe that, in some way, having a theatrical background should exclude you from the movies, which was a fashionable thing in the 1970s. It’s ludicrous given that Hollywood is built by mostly European theatre people. You can’t speak any quicker than Cary Grant speaks in most of his movies – it’s really cool – and everybody gets everything, nothing misses. I love to watch those two together, because they’re dry, they’re witty, they’re fuuny and it’s romantic, and they get together in the end. I’d have said The Godfather, because it is one of the greatest films ever made, but it’s too obvious! I also like to watch Sign of the Times with Prince, because he does the splits whilst playing the guitar and comes back up on the backbeat, and anyone who can do that is good enough for me. Also The Last Detail, with Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid, which is a marvellous movie, and all those 70s movies like Dog Day Afternoon with the young Al Pacino. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. The Servant with James Fox and Dirk Bogarde is another great English film, that if you want to see two halves of the 60s British films, check out Performance with James Fox and check out Le Serpent with James Fox, and then you get a pretty good idea; both ends of the spectrum."