"A perfect movie. Too perfect for me the first time I saw it at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971. It went right by me. The same thing happened the first time I had dinner at Chez Panisse. Sometimes an aesthetic experience is so sure-handed and flawless it’s beyond your ability to absorb it. I returned to Rules of the Game after seeing Grand Illusion and my favorite Renoir, The Crime of M. Lange. In fact, I saw a whole retrospective of his work before I realized what I had missed the first time I saw Rules of the Game. “Everyone has his reasons” is more than a line of dialogue; it is a comment on the true nature of what makes us so painfully human. Twenty-five years of meals and a day in the kitchen of Chez Panisse has taught me how they make a masterpiece right."

"It’s so corny, but it was the first film I saw and the thing about the mother hit me really badly. I remember it was a good connection with my sister, who was fifteen years older. I was about 5 or 6.”"

"My second exposure to Kurosawa (I saw Ran in the theaters and was way too young to appreciate it). My favorite performance by Toshiro Mifune and my favorite death-by-1,000-arrows sequence. And one of the first DVDs I ever bought."

"Red by Kieslowski. I love that whole trilogy, but Red, for me, was the most full film. I think it made me think about the world from new angles that I hadn’t before. I think I was about seventeen when I saw it."

"I saw this movie as an adolescent in the late fifties, at the Bay Theatre in Pacific Palisades, and it made me feel strange things I’d never felt before . . . I also thought that Brigitte Bardot was the number-one sex kitten on earth."