"It’s a typical choice maybe. I’m a huge Coppola fan – I’ve seen it many times in many different versions and formats and that movie, to me, is just fantastic storytelling, interesting characters, maybe the best war film I’ve ever seen. You are transported into his incredibly exotic world and it tells the story of something that is based on reality but the director kind of creates his own reality. He constructs this horrible place – his own interpretation of hell and he that makes me believe in it. It’s a movie that I can always watch again and never get tired of, and it always feel like I’m in the presence of a genius magician. I think I prefer the theatrical cut of the movie. The Redux, with the scene with all the French colonialist people, I didn’t feel added much."

"I learned over the years – by meeting legitimate jazz musicians who knew Mezzrow and the people he wrote about in the book – that this memoir was filled with apocryphal stories. But it had a great impact on me because I was learning to be a jazz clarinet player, like Mezzrow, and learning to play the idiom of music that he and Bernard Wolfe wrote about. The story, while probably just a lot of junk, was compelling for me because it was about many musicians whose work I knew and admired and the ins and outs of jazz joints that I knew about and the legendary songs that were played in the legendary nightclubs. So I had a great time reading it when my own jazz passion was forming. But I know it's not a very good or even a very honest book."

"What’s my fifth favorite movie? Now there have been quite a number of them. See now I’m sort of in no-man’s land, because I’m thinking Bonnie and Clyde, I’m thinking Chinatown… I’m just wandering around now. [laughs] One of my favorite books was Black Beauty; I read it when I was eight-years-old, and I’m trying to find if there was a movie, like that, that sticks with me. Oh, I know! Moby Dick. Yes. Now that was filmmaking. John Huston. Call me… Ishmael. I read the book, and there are very few books that I have read and seen the movie and liked the movie. Gregory Peck was in two of ’em: Moby Dick and To Kill a Mockingbird. Gregory Peck was one of my favorite actors. Gregory Peck and Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart, those guys."