"Being a military historian, I was really blown away by the depiction that [Stanley] Kubrick had of trench life. But more importantly, I was immersed in the moral quagmire that Col. Dax, played by Kirk Douglass, experienced in the film. There’s a moment when somebody looks down at a cockroach and says, “You see that cockroach?” He says something like, “In an hour, he’ll have more relevance than I do.” And [another character] steps on the cockroach and says, “Not anymore.” Also, it was a very revolutionary shooting style that Kubrick presented, with his long tracking shots and his use of close-up wide lenses that I found very attractive. I first saw that film when I was a cadet at West Point."

"Final Fight This was my second film as director and it was made in same style as my first film, Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow. I got to work with my father, who first got me into filmmaking. Since I was still just starting out, the budget and schedule were very tight. And at that point, people were still figuring out the kung fu genre, so we were really left to figure things out on our own. All the hard work paid off and the film was a huge success in Asia. It made drunken boxing popular again to the point where wushu started practicing it again. It made Jackie Chan a star and it got me work for years to come."

"As a bass player and singer I liked Jack Bruce’s style. And then there was Clapton. Sometimes it was hard to tell who was singing what song, but this really influential on a generation of musicians, as was Jimi Hendrix – but I discovered Cream slightly before Hendrix. I liked both sides of Cream – the jamming and the songs – and Paul and l used to play music like that with jamming and long solos. I lost interest in Clapton after Cream, because I liked him best when he was playing through 1000 watts. I do like songs like ‘Layla’, because I’m a songwriter, but I didn’t follow him when he returned specifically to playing the blues. For that I preferred Gary Moore."

"Oh God, yes. Cheers. It teaches you that the camera is a weapon that can be deployed brilliantly. What is beautiful about I Am Cuba is that, as showy as it is, it’s not style for no point. It’s an expansive vision of the rot that we brought to Cuba. Whether you agree with its politics or not, it’s not really the issue; it’s really human, and you understand… Well, a poet wrote it. Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote it. You understand the humanity of the people in it. Whether they are subject to humiliation, or to the humiliation of capitalism, well, that’s almost secondary to their own inner lives. The movie validates their inner lives, and the camera is a weapon in doing so. Beautiful."

"The seemingly precious whimsy of Wes Anderson’s style masks a sensibility that is at once delicate and magnificently imaginative. The Royal Tenenbaums has been described as an adaptation of a great novel that doesn’t exist, and it is set in an upper Upper West Side that also doesn’t exist. Anderson literally creates a world of his own to explore the most primal emotions and family dynamics. There is so much to savor—the sweat suits, the enchanting music, Gene Hackman on a tricycle—and the DVD is also a world of its own, as beautifully packaged as, well, a Wes Anderson film, with Kent Jones’s lucid manifesto defining Anderson’s particular brand of genius, and a great gallery of production design drawings."

"Carver’s spare, minimalist style serves as a writer’s manual for how to get more out of less. In a sentence, or even just a phrase, Carver establishes the mood, the nature of his characters and their predicament. He gives us clues instead of paragraphs of description or lengthy dialogue. I often put people onto Carver, especially when they’ve shown me something they’ve written that needs drastic paring down. Now and then I’ve found it a good corrective when my own writing gets out of hand. My copy of this collection (thirty stories arranged chronologically by the date they were written) is well worn. Carver had something original to show the rest of us, and his early death is a real tragedy."

"Rushmore. That must come up a lot. But it’s funny, and I know that the movie Harold and Maude is probably a big influence on that; but I hadn’t seen that when I saw Rushmore. I hadn’t seen anything like it. It’s really funny. I think Wes Anderson is really hilarious and most people don’t notice, because of the style of the film. Grand Budapest Hotel, to me, was the funniest film of the year, but people saw it as an art film. I think I related to Max as well, because I grew up poor like he did, and when I went to University I did feel like I was kind of pretending of fitting in this world. I related to Max."