"The next one, I think we got to go to Bergman. We go to go to Seventh Seal. Seventh Seal just knocked me dead. On many levels, it’s such a simple film. You’ve got Mary and Joseph, the young people with their little traveling theater, and then you’ve got the knight. I think it was the way he dealt with the Middle Ages and intrigued me with Death there at playing chess. Those were images that just stuck in my head. It was funny. When I was doing Parnassus, I went back and looked at it, because I was trying to remind myself what Mary and Joseph and their little traveling theater was like. I had forgotten so much detail. That was just a really important film, and Max von Sydow was something… The first time I had seen basically a non-American actor at work. He looked different. He behaved differently. Because, you know, I grew up with Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Doris Day, Rock Hudson — shiny teeth and beautifully combed hair and all of that nonsense. Something profound was going on in that movie without pointing fingers at anything. It just did it. The squire — that was Gunnar Björnstrand, I think — was just a great character, the cynic in the midst of it all. I remember when he was talking, when he was in this church, and all the frescoes are there, and it’s just profound filmmaking."

"Sitting on nearly everyone’s perennial list of the greatest antiwar films, Stanley Kubrick’s classic, set amid the ranks of a decadent French army command during World War I, offers breathtaking filmmaking on every level: acting, directing, writing, technical. A piercing Kirk Douglas shows up with his reliable blend of machismo and conscience. Veteran actors like Adolphe Menjou and George Macready are magnificent. However, Wayne Morris, Timothy Carey, and Kubrick regular Joseph Turkel bring a grit and suffering to offset the spit and polish of the debauched French commanders. Calder Willingham and the great novelist/screenwriter Jim Thompson wrote the script. The film features incredible photography by George Krause. Along with The Killing, Paths of Glory marks the critical onset of Kubrick’s now legendary career."

"Shawshank, I guess, because of the quiet nature of the movie, the development of it. I’ve heard that it’s a movie that didn’t really catch the multitude of fanfare for a while. People didn’t catch on immediately. I got it immediately. I got the story, the narrative, and who can’t listen to Morgan Freeman narrate a movie all day long? Also, Tim Robbins killed it. Our very own William Sadler, of course, who has brought to us Tony Teresi, in terms of [Joseph Sikora’s] Tommy’s father in Power. Sadler was great in it. Clancy Brown, who was in The Guardian with me and Kevin Costner, one of my first castmates. The Guardian was probably my second big movie. So, I love Shawshank."

"The flip side of the “The Sorrow of War,” this book is a brilliant and telling account of one brutal battle in Vietnam from the American perspective. Moore was the commander of soldiers who were airdropped into the jungle, only to be promptly surrounded and massively outnumbered by North Vietnamese troops. The reporter Joseph Galloway had rare access to the troops, witnessing this desperate battle for survival. I love it for the story of heroic journalism. It is why I so admire books like “Once Upon a Distant War,” by William Prochnau, which is the Vietnam war seen through the eyes of legendary correspondents like Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, Peter Arnett, and others of that generation, providing stark evidence of their courage and fearless contributions to history and truth."