"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."

"""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."

"Speaking of that, we must go to Blade Runner — true visual genius, and also in a class never matched. I saw it the first show, the first day, with a bunch of my friends. I can remember that because it was at the Cinerama dome in Hollywood, and it was on that huge screen with that incredible sound system. I still remember that great Vangelis music. But that opening — it’s embedded in my mind, that opening, with that scape of the city and its almost Mayan-like temple formation and those fires out of nowhere shooting up. Plus, Sean Young — that interview [with Harrison Ford’s Deckard] is unbelievable. I got a lovely letter from her last year. I worked with her on Cousins. Amazingly, amazingly beautiful. And of course it has the great Harrison Ford, and Edward James Olmos, and we could just go on and on with that movie. Daryl Hannah is great in it. And the doll guy, William Sanderson, who I got to work with on The Client — he played one of Tommy Lee Jones’ posse. One of the great things about my job is that I’ve been able to cast, sometimes, my favorite people."