"Definitely. And I said a minute ago that I wasn’t going to mention anyone younger than me, but I have to say Jonathan is younger than me. Actually, for the first long period that we worked with him, I assumed he was about twenty years younger than he really is. I remember being electrified by seeing Something Wild back in 1986. Jonathan presented a portrait of an America that was garishly and gorgeously colorful—the colors, the characters, the actors were all so fresh, so delicious—it was an amazing world in which anything could happen."

"Definitely. And I said a minute ago that I wasn’t going to mention anyone younger than me, but I have to say Jonathan is younger than me. Actually, for the first long period that we worked with him, I assumed he was about twenty years younger than he really is. I remember being electrified by seeing Something Wild back in 1986. Jonathan presented a portrait of an America that was garishly and gorgeously colorful—the colors, the characters, the actors were all so fresh, so delicious—it was an amazing world in which anything could happen."

"If the game is a film, then what are the rules? According to Renoir, who like Hoyle could load a deck with the best of ’em, you take a cast that presages Altman’s later operatic ensembles, you take an upstairs and downstairs at war through manner and subterfuge, you take a manor house with a camera that has an omniscient sweep—and you get one very fine film that can tell you more about social politics and film in a single two-hour period than Emily Post or a textbook can in a month or a lifetime."

"Medium Cool. I’m crazy about that film. To me, there are a lot of great films from that era because I was seeing them in our movie house when I was a kid [Luhrmann’s dad ran a theater for a period], but what I love about Medium Cool is that it preempts the idea of taking a real historical event and weaving a drama around it. So that’s great about it. Robert Forster is great in that picture. Not to mention — and I’ll be a bit flippant here — the clothes are fantastic. It’s just a great pop cultural picture."

"In the mid-seventies I got more into the art of cinema (and into the arts in general), which coincided with a great period in American cinema. I got seriously hooked on Taxi Driver, Badlands, Days of Heaven. These films with alienated heroes, where landscape becomes soul-scape. They made me realize that cinema can be this amazing space where images, words, faces, landscapes, and music all melt together in a mysterious way. Even now, my favorite films are those that take you out of yourself, that make you enter this other world on-screen. These three films did exactly that to me."

"In the mid-seventies I got more into the art of cinema (and into the arts in general), which coincided with a great period in American cinema. I got seriously hooked on Taxi Driver, Badlands, Days of Heaven. These films with alienated heroes, where landscape becomes soul-scape. They made me realize that cinema can be this amazing space where images, words, faces, landscapes, and music all melt together in a mysterious way. Even now, my favorite films are those that take you out of yourself, that make you enter this other world on-screen. These three films did exactly that to me."

"I love that movie, when I was a kid I went to the movie theater and saw it 14 times the first weekend. You could see it over and over, they wouldn’t kick you out of the theater back then, so I would just stay there everyday and watch it. To this day, I still love that movie. I think it was brilliant. Sometimes with things like that, you attach a certain period of your life to it, and I saw this when I was a kid. If I’d been 40 years old in 1966, maybe I would have felt differently."