"My favorite is still Badlands. It was Charlie Sheen’s dad, Martin Sheen. It was his first movie, I think. Terry Malick is the director; Sissy Spacek, who was a young, 14-year-old girl."

"It’s like a surge of intimacy of human beings, you know? It is spectacular. It is well done, a lot of actors, and I like very much Coppola as a director. I like the performance of the main role, the guy…he had a heart attack. I don’t remember his name. Martin Sheen. I almost said Martin Short. [laughs] I like also the performance of Marlon Brando. I like it very much, that movie."

"Badlands is one of those movies that you wish you had made yourself. Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen are incredible, and while the plot is simple, the film is a deep portrait not only of its characters but of a generation. It’s full of mystery, and the use of voice-over is so beautiful. I keep coming back to it before preproduction on my films because there’s something brutally poetic about it that I just adore. It triggers my wish to make things."

"Apocalypse Now was one of the first films that I saw that showed film could be a malleable art form, something that could exist outside of a super-traditional three-act structure. Martin Sheen and his character are sort of wrestling with more than just trying to find courage, but also trying to find some reason for why he was there in the first place. Speaking to a lot of Vietnam vets, I know it’s especially prominent in the Black experience. Soldiers felt incredibly disenfranchised about Vietnam because they weren’t being respected back home, but expected to have the motivation to fight for their country. But looking at it even from Martin Sheen’s case, his character is white, but that was part of his motivation."

"Terrence Malick is the preeminent practicing metaphysician of the cinema. In his brilliant and haunting first feature, he tells the story of a vicious young serial killer and his impassive underage girlfriend, both perfectly rendered by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. The violence unfolds in the context of a vastly uncaring natural world and is relayed to us by the girl through a detached narration utterly innocent of emotion. The result is not a moral inquiry into human action but rather a compelling meditation on the nature of being itself."