"A great, great movie that was unjustly robbed of a lot of the recognition it would have gotten, but it came out in the year of amazing other movies, you know, like Apocalypse Now and a lot of other great stuff. To this date it is the most accurate portrayal of theater folk and what it’s like to produce and be part of theater. As a theater geek all my life, I was hoping that Smash would be like that, and boy it’s not. All That Jazz nailed it, just in terms of the reality of it. But again, it would go off into those fantasies that still totally worked, and worked as incredible dance numbers, but you know, were clearly fantasy numbers inside one of the most realistic portrayals of that subculture that had never been put on screen. It’s f—ing perfect. It’s just f—ing perfect. It’s great because it’s funny, it’s cynical about the theater but also clearly loves the subject matter. You know, I grew up backstage — my parents were actors — and it just captures that world absolutely incredibly accurately. Plus, it’s just a really ballsy, artistic movie from Bob Fosse in that it incorporates a lot of strange stuff, but all of it works."

"Kurosawa, my God. I saw that film and I left the theater and I thought, “When I grow up I wanna be a samurai.” I just love it, I think it’s great. Kurosawa, you can’t get any better. Do you remember Ran?"

"Twentieth Century is a show business theater story, and Barrymore gives an extraordinary performance. Orson Welles told me that whenever he and Larry Olivier did a comedy, after seeing it, that he and Larry both were just doing Barrymore in the 20th Century. "

"I saw Pan’s Labyrinth when it played at the New York Film Festival, and it was a euphoric experience. That movie was just the best. I watched it four or five times in the theater. One time I was in Mexico with my family and I was wandering around the streets and saw that it was playing at a theater and I went in. I don’t speak very good Spanish, but the movie worked so well without me knowing what anybody was saying because the visual storytelling is so incredible. We watched it a lot as a reference on We the Animals."

"I love that movie, when I was a kid I went to the movie theater and saw it 14 times the first weekend. You could see it over and over, they wouldn’t kick you out of the theater back then, so I would just stay there everyday and watch it. To this day, I still love that movie. I think it was brilliant. Sometimes with things like that, you attach a certain period of your life to it, and I saw this when I was a kid. If I’d been 40 years old in 1966, maybe I would have felt differently."

"One of six films Wellman made in 1932. All are great. I saw this at Film Forum on a very cold November day in 2013, left the theater, and had to walk for five miles without stopping to get a hold of myself again."

"Anything that revolves around John Cassavetes has my vote. Anything that revolves around Gena Rowlands has my vote. Anything that revolves around the theater and aging and legacy and panic has my vote. So much anxiety, so much chaos. It’s human and imperfect and porous."