"I love history, I’ve read a number of books on the subject. I recently read Lustrum (by Robert Harris), a book set in ancient Rome. It’s a fictional historical account of what happened in 55BC or thereabouts, and Caesar."

"Let’s start with the most modern one, I suppose. La Grande Bellezza [aka] The Great Beauty. Paolo Sorrentino‘s movie. There’s a million different reasons. I think it’s the elegance of Toni Servillo‘s character. I think he’s almost like Dante going through the three stages of Paradiso, Inferno, Purgatorio. I used to live in Rome, so it’s a beautiful imagination of what Rome is. It’s the furious bacchanal element of the night life. The overzealous, religious conservatism of the daytime. It’s so beautifully done, and it’s elegant and dangerous. It’s intellectual. And buffoonish in all in the same breath. It’s an incredible movie. He’s a wonderful director."

"I gotta go for one of the Terminators as well — I don’t know which one. [laughs] Probably one, because the first time I saw it… one is always more difficult than the second one, I think. I saw that in Rome after Arnie brought it over when I was doing Red Sonja. We were gonna go out to Rome one night and I said, “I can’t, I’m working, I’ve got a five-o’clock-in-the-morning start,” and he said, “Well, take this — go up to your room and watch this video.” And I watched it — and it was a rough cut of it — and I went, “Oh my god, it’s the greatest film I’ve ever seen.”"

"Early on, surprisingly enough, Italian cinema broke the Hollywood barrier by making simple, down-to-earth stories. Most of the films were made without live sound but dubbed later by experts. It meant that noisy, unblimped cameras would give flexibility to image-making. Stories like Bicycle Thieves, Rome Open City, and Paisan all fell into that category."