"I’m a big fan of David Lean. Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago take up three of my favorites. This can go for all three of Lean’s films, because they’re all very similar. They all have very strong characters, very developed characters. He has a unique visual style; it’s very important for the way the movie looks. There are stories about how he’d sit in the desert for half a day, just waiting for the clouds to be right before he’d start filming. You can imagine what a producer would be doing during this. [Smiles] So I love films that have strong visual styles, and all of those films have very unique styles."

"Yes, Cassavetes again, and by now it’s a no-brainer as to who my favorite filmmaker is. This time he takes on the gangster/noir genre but does it in his own inimitable abstract-expressionist style, where time slows down or sometimes speeds up, so we never know exactly where we are in terms of a traditional story arc or act structures. We are in dreamland . . . an opium-induced reverie. This is a portrait of an artist in the guise of a strip club owner, and Ben Gazzara’s Cosmo Vitelli is a career-topping performance. The onstage burlesque routines are worth the price of admission, as is the one and only Mr. Sophistication, played by Meade Roberts."

"I remember seeing A Clockwork Orange as a very young kid — probably too young to be seeing it — and there was something kind of dangerous about that world. It was like I know I should have been watching, but there was something about the style in which it was shot. Maybe it was how long the camera stayed looking at one thing, but it didn’t move very far. It captured a certain theatrical nature of something. There was almost a vaudeville quality to it all as well. I think I’m drawn to that because I have a love of theatre, and of pictures that are perhaps a little bit larger than life."

"Generally accepted as Mizoguchi’s greatest work, Ugetsu is based on supernatural Japanese folk tales by the celebrated eighteenth-century author Ueda Akinari. Mizoguchi is most concerned with a compassionate telling of human sorrow, and he finds plenty of substance in Akinari’s short stories. Infamously uncompromising, Mizoguchi was a perfectionist when it came to all aspects of the process. His visual compositions, the production design, the special effects, the lighting, the performances by the actors (especially Machiko Kyo, who adheres in this case to a more traditionally Japanese theatrical style of performance), and the sound design are all so finely tuned and executed, it’s as though Mizoguchi had the ability to be in multiple places at once."

"I’m a big fan of David Lean. Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago take up three of my favorites. This can go for all three of Lean’s films, because they’re all very similar. They all have very strong characters, very developed characters. He has a unique visual style; it’s very important for the way the movie looks. There are stories about how he’d sit in the desert for half a day, just waiting for the clouds to be right before he’d start filming. You can imagine what a producer would be doing during this. [Smiles] So I love films that have strong visual styles, and all of those films have very unique styles."

"After Gone and Road Warrior is Pulp Fiction, which I consider a perfect movie. I consider it a pitch-perfect movie. I’ve gotten to the point now where I pray to not come across it while channel surfing because, if I see five frames of it, then I have to sit and watch the rest of it. I’m now up to something like 30 or 40 times I’ve seen it. I just love that movie and all its dimensions, its crazy story structure, Quentin’s just brilliant dialogue, and the kind of mix of style and atmosphere with these memorable, memorable characters. Pulp is definitely one [of my favorites], although anything Tarantino would be good with me."

"The ultimate existential gangster film. Hypnotic, detailed, ritualistic, it has influenced
 films like John Woo’s The Killer and the more recent Drive. Alain Delon
 gives his most memorable performance as an ice-cold assassin above such mundane
 concerns as moral conscience. Though violent in its subject matter, Jean-Pierre
 Melville’s film is also cool, meticulously lit, and classically framed. It
 operates in a kind of dream state. It’s the opposite of the fevered emotional style of
 most gangster films. The pauses and silences help make it the visual equivalent of Harold
 Pinter’s dialogue. This is my favorite Melville film, and the extras are among 
Criterion’s finest, including an interview with John Woo and one with Melville himself."