"John Ford. John Wayne. And amazingly modern in its approach."

"My Darling Clementine is my favorite John Ford—so beautiful it hurts."

"I’m in a total John Ford mood. I saw The Searchers again on Turner Classic Movies the other night and I just said, “Oh, I gotta go and see John Ford’s movies, like all over again.” The Searchers is such an obvious choice because everyone knows that one. I’m gonna put down They Were Expendable, which was a John Ford Movie…"

"Number five…like I said, it always changes. There are a lot of good movies out there [that are] from time to time favorites. I would do The Searchers, from John Ford, with John Wayne. I’m a big Western fan, and this was a great Western. John Ford is interesting; if you are younger, you don’t appreciate John Ford so much. I liked more Howard Hawks and William Wyler Westerns when I was younger, and now, later, if you get a little older, you like John Ford more and more. It’s the same with some writers. There are some writers you love when you’re 20, and when you’re 30 or 35 you think it’s completely silly bulls–t what the guys wrote (laughs), but you appreciate other writers."

"When asked to name a filmmaker who interested him, John Ford answered, “Renoir.” Pressed to name one film, he growled, “All of it.” Time to return the compliment: “John Ford . . . All of it,” if one wants to tap back into the ethos and the pathos of the republic and understand in the process both that form and content were never separate entities and that figures don’t have to be squarely at the center of the frame for a film to exist—crucial reminders in these times of ours."

"I think this is the best John Ford film. Tautly constructed, well acted, and superbly shot. A shame that Darryl Zanuck was able to monkey with it. He actually improved a couple of scenes, but, overall, his changes were damaging."

"Exquisite John Ford, breaking all our hearts. This is the western I recommend to people who don’t think they like westerns. The scene when Victor Mature as the tubercular Doc Holliday recites Hamlet’s famous soliloquy shouldn’t work, but it absolutely dazzles."

"One of the very few westerns, my favorite classical genre, in the Criterion Collection. How to make an almost huis clos in the immensity of Monument Valley? Only Ford had that secret. The apparition of the great John Wayne in the Ford family, as the Ringo Kid, in a beautiful tracking shot, made him a star. Later, Wayne said about Ford: “This made me a star, and I’ll be grateful to him forever. But I don’t think he ever really had any kind of respect for me as an actor until I made Red River for Howard Hawks, ten years later. Even then, I was never quite sure.”"

"Taking a slight turn, I love the John Wayne film The Quiet Man. It’s quite something. It’s a John Ford movie, it’s John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. It’s kind of like John Wayne’s Brigadoon. He plays this boxer who killed a man in the ring in the States, and so, to escape his past, he moves to his ancestral little home in Ireland. It’s this quaint little village, and I believe it’s called Innisfree — I know Innisfree is from a Yeats poem, and it sort of represents the small Irish town of heaven; it’s sort of a fantastical place — but the town in The Quiet Man is Innisfree, which makes sense. So he goes there to escape his past, falls in love, of course, with Maureen O’Hara — who wouldn’t? — and her brother turns out to be the enormous, pugilistic, evil, Bluto-like landlord. So the movie cannot be resolved, nor can their love, without one final fistfight. It’s funny; just the other day, I sent a message to my agent, “Remake idea: The Quiet Man?” I have two fists. I can swagger."

"I’d have to have a John Ford movie; there are four or five movies of his that are tied in my book. He added a secular audience involvement in what was the beauty of cinema. In other words, he was the first guy that I think made movies live up to the potential of what they could be, and continued to do so throughout his career. He was able to be, to me, the most profoundly humanistic bridge between the potential of cinema and how it relates to the human condition."