"It's about the quality of the star, those people who the camera just loves, and James Dean is really amazing. He's moody, but there's a lot going on beneath the surface. He doesn't go with the crowd which is always very attractive. When you're dealing with adolescence you've always got the kids with that strength of character. I think that's very important. I watched Rebel Without A Cause in the eighties with a group of kids and they thought it was really funny and old fashioned. When you look at it it now it is obviously a bit melodramatic, but that's partly because it's influenced so many films since. It's also a very strange film, a fated film, because the three main juvenile leads, Sal Mineo, Natalie Wood and James Dean, died prematurely. Sal Mineo was murdered in the late seventies, Natalie Wood drowned in an accident, and of course JD was too fast too young."

"Number one is Giant. Starting off with the incomprable James Dean. I love that movie. I love how epic it is in scope. I love that it’s about a woman who is coming into her own and thinks she’s going into one situation and, of course, has to dominate and overcome. For me, for my money, if I had to choose between Giant and Gone with the Wind, I’d go Giant every time."

"Andrzej Wajda’s films had an enormous influence on me as I began writing and directing. I had lunch with him at the National Film Theatre in London, after he had just made Everything for Sale, a film I loved. It was Wajda’s tribute to Zbigniew Cybulski, his friend and the star of Ashes and Diamonds, who died young. In Ashes, Cybulski plays a resistance fighter stranded by a sellout peace. His broodiness and manner seemed to mourn James Dean."

"Another film I really loved is Control. It was directed by Anton Corbijn. It was the story of Joy Division and it was black and white and it was so kind of picturesque. But the cinematography — I think that Anton Corbijn is a photographer who is [an] artist in many forms — some of the shots that he kind of captures in that film are absolutely stunning. I actually haven’t seen his most recent film that I think is called Life, which is a film about James Dean but Control is definitely one I recommend. To anybody."

"Yes, I admired Marlon Brando and I know that he influenced James Dean and he really kind of changed the world of film acting with his naturalistic style, but it was because of Vivien Leigh’s performance as Blanche DuBois that I would put that as one of my favorite movies; because of her dialog, the Tennessee Williams dialog, the music, Kazan’s direction, and Vivien Leigh’s delivery of lines like — I’m paraphrasing — but when she says, “the human heart, how can that be straight?”, you know. It was such a powerfully vulnerable, tragic performance that I have to put that on the top five, because that movie held that performance."

"I also love Elia Kazan and it was a toss up for me between On the Waterfront, which I saw as a child, and East of Eden, which I saw as a young kid, and also rediscovered as an adult. But I do remember more recently a beautiful print that was struck — maybe by UCLA archives, maybe by AFI; I’m not sure who — and they had a screening of it at a theater that’s the longer one there in Century City, beautiful theater. At one time I think it was the state of the art theater in the country, with the first reclining seats and all that. They had [screened it] somehow, in conjunction with the LA city school system and the English department of LA city schools. And I believe that the matinee that I saw was predominantly schools… And the kids have to read East of Eden or Steinbeck, Travels with Charley or something in school, and you could tell this was going to be their Steinbeck assignment, so it was a field trip. But this… wasn’t a movie for young people, and I was a little worried that the noise, the kicking of the seats, and the high jinx that were prevailing in the auditorium before the lights went down would keep going. And I remember about five minutes into the film there’s a shot of James Dean hopping a freight — he jumps this train, near Monterey and he goes to Salinas, or vice versa — he hops the train and is on his way to Monterey to visit his mother, to find his mother in a brothel. And it’s cold, it’s evening — he pulls his little sweater over his head like a hoodie and he bundles up almost in a fetal position on the top of this train, snaking it’s way through the country side in Monterey county. And the entire audience shut up and you could hear a pin drop. It was the power of a true movie star. It was the first American teenager, James Dean, on the screen. And it didn’t matter that it was a predominantly… junior high school to high school kids — they got it. They got his angst, they got his beauty, they got his rebellion, all in literally 30 seconds’ worth of him exuding teen angst in the film and it was just this great moment. It reminded me of the power of stardom, of light and shadow on the screen, of a Greta Garbo, of a great screen kiss between — God rest her soul — the late Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne in The Quiet Man, or John Travolta strutting down the sidewalk in Saturday Night Fever— it’s just this great thing. And I love that movie anyway. There’s sequences and scenes in that movie, and James Dean, his grace in that movie — I think his movement in that movie is only matched by one or two Lee Marvin performances, and maybe one or two Sean Connery performances that I’ve seen in terms of just male physical grace. Really a great film, and I had to put Kazan on my list. So Kazan would be my number five for East of Eden starring James Dean."

"Because of Malcolm McDowell I’m gonna go into A Clockwork Orange, because that was the other great teenage performance, along with James Dean in East of Eden. Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of the subject of violence and the mystery of nature and to go against out natures and what is or isn’t necessary, and what is the true evil, and all of these questions that came out of the absurdist and evocative film that is Clockwork Orange, again, is everlasting. And also his lighting: even today when you look at some of the stills from the movie, when they’re in the Milk Bar, it looks like virtual reality and I don’t know how he did it — he was really a master of light."

"Probably my favorite book of all time because of the truthful, raw language—it sounds so modern. To think that it was written almost seventy-five years ago at the end of World War II seems both astounding and inevitable. Plain, honest communication and wild, spontaneous beauty were all that was left after they’d cleared away the rubble. Enter Holden Caulfield, an off-kilter personality balancing an unlikely mix of cruelty, kindness, truth, acceptance and rebellion in one rather average noggin. Holden represents a new type of heartthrob, presaging the bored, hyper-vigilant James Dean types of later cinema—the romantic nihilists, capable of loving fiercely in the moment but standing equally aloof from and critiquing their own emotions. The dawning of the age of emo."

"First of all, how can you go wrong with a cast that includes Dennis Wilson, James Taylor, Harry Dean Stanton, Warren Oates, and of course Laurie Bird? I often imagine how great it would be to go back in time and see this film in some half-empty cinema when it opened. I discovered this film while working at the video store, when there was renewed interest in it in the late nineties. I even went so far as to reach into my video-store earnings and buy the deluxe edition, which came in a tin can with a comprehensive book. Well worth it for the unseen photos. The beginning scene, with its utter lack of dialogue, has to be one of my favorite pieces of cinema. Much of the acting feels improvised, which adds to the lost, directionless quality."