"There’s a movie called James Dean. It’s about James Dean’s life, and James Franco played James Dean. I love that movie. I just thought James Franco was so good in that. He was so interesting, and it’s just a really cool independent film. I really like that movie. It was weird; he just looked and sounded and acted so much like James Dean, it was ridiculous."

"The second will be Giant with James Dean."

"In the anthropology of my mind, the idea of a movie star can be traced back to James Dean and Brigitte Bardot. If Bardot is always doing Bardot, then this film is the best of her. Her wild, feral sexiness, culminating in that final dance scene—by that point I'm dizzy from her."

"It’s a film about the lift story of an otter. It’s beautiful. If it’s just one otter playing the part, it is the James Dean of otters. There’s a heron and there’s a love interest, White- Tip. It’s multicultural because there’s an owl family. It’s an animal melting pot, by the side of a river."

"I can’t help but love Giant. A lot of people don’t take Giant seriously. A lot of people like Rebel WIthout a Cause when you’re talking about a movie with James Dean and it’s okay, but I thought James Dean was practically Soupy Sales in that movie. Very over the top. Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor were great in this movie. It’s a classic sweeping story, it’s got a Gone with the Wind kind of vibe, and once again, the little guy who strikes oil becomes this power mad lunatic. Then the whole way they dealt with racism and how it was at the time in Texas, with the Latino wife of Dennis Hopper and that whole thing. Great story and well acted and looked like a movie, you know?"

"The first two, I’m gonna go with Elia Kazan, ’cause they’re really the reason why I became an actor in movies. East of Eden, with James Dean, and A Streetcar Named Desire, with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. The performance by James Dean — the scene specifically where he tries to give his father, played by Raymond Massey, the money from selling the beans on his birthday, and he’s rejected — it broke my heart; it was not like anything I’d experienced before, in terms of art, and I’d seen a lot of movies at that point. I was 15, and I’d seen Bergman’s Seventh Seal and Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Welles’ Citizen Kane — great films, but when I saw Dean in that, it really put the hook in me because I felt like him and I knew then the power of film acting, and I knew then what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do to try to move people with motion pictures. So that’s why I have to put that on the list."

"I love East of Eden, there’s so much passion. I was reading about how it was made, and how it was such a new thing for James Dean to be doing. One of those scenes was really improvisational between he and his father or mother, and he has this burst of emotion that came from nowhere, that he didn’t even understand. He had such virility in that movie — I love it."