"A movie that I dove into at age fifteen and have yet to emerge from. Warren Beatty trudging endlessly through the snow, trying to escape his fate: what better metaphor for getting through life—or making a movie?"

"Here’s a movie with a political conspiracy plot that’s all too real. Warren Beatty stars in this elliptical thriller, playing a reporter who insinuates himself into a murderously effective multi-national corporation. Startling, eccentric, and a scary-close approximation of the world we actually live in today, this film continues to stoke the twin fires of paranoia and mistrust."

"Warren Beatty directed, about the life of John Reed. Jack Nicholson is Eugene O’Neill, one of his greatest performances. It combines everything I love about movies: great acting, unbelievable romance, and politics. Sondheim did the music, Elaine May helped write it. It’s kind of the bar. I just think of what cinema can accomplish. It’s like a great, great novel, only better. And with one of the great endings of all time. Just so beautiful."

"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."

"I always see this every couple of years to remind myself how difficult movie making can be and how much hard work and vision can be rewarded. What Warren Beatty did in that to star, produce, write, and direct was just one of the most colossal achievements in moviemaking. And how he was able to offer such an incredibly strong performance and direct himself and create one of the most heart-wrenching scenes at the train station with Diane Keaton, I look at that and wonder how the hell did he do that? How does any human pull that off, let alone get the tens of millions of dollars for a movie about an American communist at the turn of the 20th century? On so many levels, that movie leaves me in awe."