"The mood of a decade condensed and reflected in 160 minutes—Altman’s masterpiece and the greatest film with a mid-’70s sensibility, wandering and a little stoned, yet layered and soaring with humanism. It’s Altman’s friendliest film in many ways, a party movie, even though it ends with an assassination. I don’t know a better movie to use as a time-capsule reminder of who we were and where we were as a country in 1975. Only Hal Ashby’s Shampoo comes close."

"I have a 1000… I have a top 100. I can tell you five movies that are important to me, but as I say, I could go on and on. Shampoo is important to me. Hal Ashby, one of the great directors of our time, died very young, and is sometimes overlooked; but he did The Last Detail, and Being There, and he is a great director. And Robert Towne wrote the script with Warren Beatty. It’s a brilliant script, a portrait of LA at a certain time and the United States when we were going through a spasm of political activity that was very discouraging — it ends with the election of Nixon and Agnew. It’s hilarious, it’s sexy; it deals with all the variety of complications of people’s behavior. Jack Warden is brilliant in it; hilarious in one of the greatest scenes ever shot: At the end of the movie when Beatty comes back to his house and he thinks that Jack Warden’s gonna have him killed ’cause he’s slept with both Warden’s wife and his daughter, Carrie Fisher. It’s a great, great film, but Warden is brilliant in that scene. The movie is full of great writing; it’s almost like a French farce, but very modern. Beatty is at his absolute best. Everybody in it is great. Julie Christie’s a knockout. So that’s an important movie that not enough people have seen."

"[Anything in Ashby’s] body of work is always recognizably him, but it’s pretty elastic. Like Being There is very different than Shampoo in a lot of ways. There’s a little bit of the surreal that can enter in, but at the same time, they’re very grounded and very of their time, and have a certain gritty feel to them. They’re not so clean. There’s a naturalism there that he marries with some very bold moves and even magical realism. [The Landlord] is this movie that not too many people have seen, didn’t have a big release originally, and it’s hard to find on DVD, and doesn’t have the reputation of Harold and Maude and Coming Home. But I kind of think it might be his best movie. Maybe it’s just because it’s so screamingly brave in a lot of ways, and it hits so many issues. There’s so few American movies that touch on class, and this just comes straight at you like a train, talking about class issues, race. [It’s about] this young man who’s born into privilege, struggling with his place. “He is to the manor born,” you know? He has money in his blood, and he can afford to go buy a building where people are living. Just a young man, Beau Bridges, and it’s probably my favorite thing I’ve ever seen Beau Bridges do, too. It’s sort of startling to see him in this role as the golden boy, and you can almost see Jeff Bridges playing it, too. And the fact that this white guy, automatically, just by the color of his skin and the place he was born and the family he was born into, has the ability to be responsible for the lives of all of these far less fortunate or privileged people. [He struggles] with that sense of responsibility and [tries] to reject it and give up that control, but [also] do right by these people. I don’t know, it’s so complex. But [Ashby’s] not afraid to have some very broad comic moments. You know, there’s a few people who can do it since. Like Alexander Payne or David O. Russell, a few other people whose work you can see owe a lot to Ashby."