"I saw Apocalypse Now really with everybody else, so Marlon Brando was there, and my uncle was showing the movie, and Dennis Hopper was there and [Marc Marrie], and … I don’t think Marrie was there, but everybody … Let’s see. Larry was there. They were watching the movie for the first time, and I must’ve been about, gosh, what was I? 12, 13? I don’t know, but it really put a big effect in me, and I was blown away by the scope of the film. I don’t think there really was a movie like that before with the helicopter sequences, and with Brando’s performance with Dennis Hopper was… I mean, he was really going off the rails in that, and that had a big impact on me as well, in terms of my own later choices with film performance. I wanted to get a little more Dennis Hopper or less Dennis Hopper with some of the stuff that I was doing, so that had a big impact."

"The first two, I’m gonna go with Elia Kazan, ’cause they’re really the reason why I became an actor in movies. East of Eden, with James Dean, and A Streetcar Named Desire, with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. The performance by James Dean — the scene specifically where he tries to give his father, played by Raymond Massey, the money from selling the beans on his birthday, and he’s rejected — it broke my heart; it was not like anything I’d experienced before, in terms of art, and I’d seen a lot of movies at that point. I was 15, and I’d seen Bergman’s Seventh Seal and Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Welles’ Citizen Kane — great films, but when I saw Dean in that, it really put the hook in me because I felt like him and I knew then the power of film acting, and I knew then what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do to try to move people with motion pictures. So that’s why I have to put that on the list."

"For a myriad of different reasons. It’s the ultimate group of lawless action buddy movies. They have all spawned from this. Every sort of two handed buddy movie as The A-Team and — it all comes from this one film: Seven Samurai. It gave Hollywood a genre. Not only did it influence the western genre very obviously, with Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood, but every genre of outsider, loner, anti-hero. The character played by Toshiro Mifune, that’s the quintessential character in Hollywood. You’ve seen it played by Montgomery Clift. You’ve seen it played by James Dean, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro. They’ve all been influenced in some way by that one character that appears in the Seven Samurai. The wildness. The gregariousness. The mad genius. The outsider. The survivor. Of course, you know the film is an incredibly, beautifully shot film. Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest writers of all time. It speaks for itself. I’ve seen it well over a hundred times. But years ago. 20 years ago — possibly the first. Maybe even 25 years ago was the first time I saw it. An extraordinary movie."

"The two films that have to be tied for first — and this is probably a hackneyed answer, but it is the way it is — are The Godfather, Part 1 and Citizen Kane. The Godfather is a perfect film. There is not one shot out of place, there’s not one performance that’s not the best thing that actor has ever done. There is not one thing about the film, visually, that’s not mind-bogglingly beautiful and elegant and astounding. And it shines a light perfectly on its subject matter. I think that there’s a gravitas, because of the presence of Marlon Brando, in the first film, that elevates it [as opposed to The Godfather, Part 2]. Not to say that the second and third films aren’t great films also, but when you have something as historically important as the performance that Brando gives as Vito Corleone, as the kind of central fulcrum point, then it goes into a class all by itself. He achieved that three times in his career, as far as I’m concerned. One was On the Waterfront. One was A Streetcar Named Desire. And one was The Godfather. And although he was the prevailing genius of the day, on those three occasions he just elevated phenomenally brilliant films into a place that became uncategorizable. How did he do that? It’s so ethereal, and so indescribable, that you could try to analyze it from now until the end of time and you couldn’t begin to put your finger on it. That was an otherworldly gift, that he had. Citizen Kane (1941, 100%) is tied for first with The Godfather. It just has to be, it’s such an amazing achievement."