"I loved this film before I knew who Stanley Kubrick was. Sterling Hayden’s portrayal of the ill-fated criminal is majestic and psychopathic. The mechanics of the heist are brilliant, but Kubrick lets us see how it’s only the flaws in the characters that bring it down."

"Strangelove — you can watch it again and again. Brilliant. To me, maybe the funniest movie ever made. Huge variety in the styles of the movie. Some of it’s shot like cinéma vérité documentary. Some of it’s very stylized. The mise en scène changes radically. When you’re in the bomber it’s hand-held — it might as well be Richie Leacock, or one of the Pennebakers making a movie; that’s how free-form it is. Totally realistic, even though you have Slim Pickens as the pilot of the jet that’s taking the atomic bomb to Russia. He’s hilarious, and yet you have a sense of this is really what it looks like — what their equipment looks like, what the gauges and the codes look like. They do a really funny sequence where they open up their survival box and there’s a condom, and there’s a 45, and it’s totally believable. And of course it ends with Slim Pickens riding the atomic bomb down like a wild horse toward Russia, and the world ending. And Sterling Hayden, absolutely hilarious throughout the movie, and Sellers playing five parts, I think. The scenes between him and Sterling Hayden, where he’s the British officer who’s been assigned to this airbase and Sterling Hayden is completely wacko and is convinced that they’re stealing his precious bodily fluids, because when he had sex he felt depleted. [Laughs]."

"I’d say Godfather 2 was up there. (And I did a movie for Francis…) After Godfather 1, I wouldn’t know how he would make a Godfather 2, but he did it. Because of the time span and what it covered, it’s an opera. I mean, there are acts, and it just worked, and I hadn’t seen that done really well. I’ll go see a movie because of moments, and I’ll go to see that movie again. I mean, like The Killing, the movie that Kubrick made when he began. Sterling Hayden is in it, where they robbed the racetrack, you know? And Sterling Hayden is in the locker room getting ready, putting the mask on, and realizing they’re not flowers in the box but a machine gun. It’s just before kick-off and he takes a long deep breath, and Stanley Kubrick was there for him."

"This is as close to a perfect film as I have ever seen. Thousands of years of humanity honing the blade of satire culminated in this searing parody from Stanley Kubrick. Typically his direction is the star of his films, but the performances here from Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, and Sterling Hayden turn this into a perfectly pitched collaboration among artists who were, at that moment in history, each firing on all cylinders. Sellers in particular excels in three completely different roles. It’s a true master class in character acting."