"I think probably Seven Samurai, by Kurosawa. I think I saw that when I was about 15 or 16 in the cinema. It’s such a big old chunk of a film, and it’s always a treat to sit down with that movie. It’s so perfectly framed, and perfectly judged; it’s basically the blueprint for most action cinema — expect that it’s much more intelligent than most action cinema. There’s characters in it that hardly only get a couple of lines, but you feel that they’re totally fleshed out. The massive battle scene at the end, which should be completely confusing, is instead just completely clear — you never worry about where you are, you never don’t understand what their plan is — and I think that’s something that you rarely see in cinema now. The closest you get to it, sometimes, is I think in James Cameron’s work — where it’s very, very methodically plotted and planned, and you feel the mechanics of everything that’s been very carefully formulated."

"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."

"This film has one of the best endings I’ve ever seen, starting with the sword fight as remembered by the woodcutter. Up until this point, the fights have looked the way fights usually look in movies. But here, from the moment we see the samurai and bandit’s two sword tips enter the frame, trembling in their shaky hands, we’re in a much more believable world, where people are afraid to kill and be killed. And then there’s this conversation between the priest and the commoner: The priest: It’s horrifying. If men don’t trust each other, this earth might as well be hell. The commoner: That’s right. This world is hell. The priest: No, I believe in men. [Pressing himself against the wall in anguish.] I don’t want this place to be hell. That moment when the priest presses himself against the wall and says “I don’t want this place to be hell” sums up pretty much everything I’ve ever tried to express in my own work. The happy ending, where the woodcutter walks off with the abandoned baby as the sun comes out, always makes me cry."