"I’ll continue the Jack Nicholson theme and go to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Of its era, the great American novel. R.P. McMurphy is probably the defining Jack Nicholson character, if you had to pick one. It’s actually the first film I ever saw. I don’t remember it, but I was a little baby and my mom took me. It’s one of those movies I’ll watch whenever I’m feeling lost or alone in the universe. Something about McMurphy and the Chief throwing the sink through the window makes life worth living. [Director] Milos Forman was a really incredible storyteller. He knew how to tell a big story where the characters feel… Part of it has to do with the level of supporting acting. He creates a full world. Christopher Lloyd and Danny DeVito and Louise Fletcher and Brad Dourif — it’s just such an incredible cast. The world feels so real. That’s what so many epic movies get wrong. They feel important in the way that it’s in italics. They just feel like they’re about the director, and not about the characters."

"The years right after the war were a very special time in cinema, all around the world. Millions were slaughtered, entire cities were leveled, humanity’s faith in itself was shaken. The greatest filmmakers were moved to create meditations on existence, on the miracle of life itself. They didn’t look away from harshness and violence—quite the contrary. Rather, they dealt with them directly and then looked beyond, from a greater and more benign distance. I’m thinking of Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis and Europa ’51, the great neorealist films by Visconti and De Sica, Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff, Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Seven Samurai, Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, Ford’s My Darling Clementine and Wagon Master, and this remarkable picture. This was Jean Renoir’s first picture after his American period, his first in color, and he used Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel to create a film that is, really, about life, a film without a real story that is all about the rhythm of existence, the cycles of birth and death and regeneration, and the transitory beauty of the world."