"The longer I live and the more movies I know, the more I love Stanley Donen. However, I fell in love with this film as a child. I went to see it because—well, because I saw everything that came to the Paramount Theater (or the Capitol) in Ashland, Kentucky. But I was especially primed for loving this movie because I was enamored of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly—I had seen that movie ten times the previous year. But Charade was a very different movie from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and for a little girl—and for that time—it was very violent, and it scared the hell out of me so much that I thought James Coburn was in my closet at night, and I made my mother go with me to check if he was there before bedtime. Nevertheless, I went back for more every weekend until its run was over. I loved the witty romance between Cary Grant and Audrey, and I loved Paris as much as I had loved New York in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And the mystery works! And I loved that so much I went back again and again, even if it scared the pee outta me. On the DVD, director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone banter amusingly from a long friendship together on the long process it took to make this film. Stone makes the great observation that when you write a mystery, you make it for a second viewing. And if the audience says, “That’s a cheat,” then you didn’t do it right. But if they see it a second time and say, “Oh, it was there all the time, and I didn’t see it,” then you have something. This film has all that and more—i.e., the best clothes ever!"

"Terminator was a real seminal piece. In fact, I read the script before [James Cameron] shot the movie. I was asking around, “Anybody read any great scripts?” I read the script — it’s a game changer. All of these films, I feel like they’re real game changers; there are films prior to these movies, and there are films after. It’s like you’ve opened up a Pandora’s Box, and the filmmaking world can never be the same — the language is different, the grammar is different. I think Jim did that in Terminator. I think he really changed the playing field. And so I read the script, and I was like, “I can’t wait to see it!” I didn’t know him, so I didn’t go and watch the shooting, but of course when it came out…the only way you can describe it is as a game changer. You have to change your rules! Again, not in any particular order, but Kurosawa has to be in there [among my favorite films and filmmakers]. Ran, Kagemusha, Dersu Uzala… and then Fassbinder‘s In a Year of 13 Moons, one of the most magnificent love stories ever made. Ozu. Pabst, who gave us the opportunity to move from one location to another and fuse it together. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it."

"To go back to the ’30s, which is the movies I saw when I was growing up on television — it was one that they never showed, because it was lost for years and it was by James Whale. It’s called The Old Dark House, 1932. It’s currently about to be reissued on Blu-ray. For years, all you could see were these sort of beat-up prints I think they found in the mid-’60s, and they had been lost, because of a remake and some rights issues and stuff. Now, it’s sort of come back, and it’s got a great cast of Charles Laughton, Gloria Stuart, Boris Karloff, Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey. It’s the classic “travelers stranded in the haunted house and the bridge has washed out”, but it’s the template for all the movies that followed it. It’s still one of the more watchable and disturbing movies from that period. And it’s a shame that it isn’t better known; it never got television distribution, and it wasn’t included in the package of Universal horror pictures because it wasn’t in their library anymore. It’s a chance, I think, for people to catch up with it now. I’m a big James Whale fan, and this might be his best picture."