"Of course, I love Raging Bull. And I love The Godfather. [Laughs] Maybe I need to find something a little fresher. But Raging Bull, you can always feel when an actor kind of goes into — I don’t know Robert De Niro, but I kind of get this feeling that he went really deep into it, and that the character and he melded together. I can feel like he’s not pretending. He’s actually living it. That’s always something that hits me, and I forget about the outside world; it’s almost like the movie I’m watching takes over and becomes my reality. I’ve seen Raging Bull so many times and it feels so pure and real. It’s beautiful and sexy and rough, and there’s so much pain in it at the same time. I think it always attracts me, you know, with people struggling and people fighting and people wanting to become something, wanting to change their lives or change who they are; people fighting with their own demons. For me, that’s such a beautiful example of that — someone who was really focused on being something, and becoming something, and how hard it is and how much you need to fight."

"Enter the Dragon was powerful to me because it was like watching a superhero come to life. I’d never seen anything like Bruce Lee, and that movie changed my life, because it made me believe that a man can actually do these extraordinary things physically, and he was a great actor. He had great facial expressions, and he’s also had a big impact in some of my choices as a film performer, certainly not in terms of my style of movement — nobody can move like him — but in some of the facial expressions. If you look at the end of Face/Off, when I shoot the Castor Troy character with the harpoon, my face goes through all these expressions. That was direct steal from Bruce Lee when he jumped on a guy and killed him with his feet. In fact, I went through that slow-motion shot rather recently with Mandy. I stole from Bruce Lee’s facial expressions when he breaks the guy’s neck and the camera goes right into his eyes and he’s got that very ferocious, wide-eyed look. He passed, and I put that in the picture."

"I want to go into another movie that I gotta bring up. The Pianist with Adrien Brody, Roman Polanski, the whole thing. Now, I don’t endorse his moral behaviors, but I have to say man, that movie… What he did with that character put me there, and I had never been there. Literally, I’m in the theater, and dude, I’m crying, I’m like, “Yo, this is crazy!” I go by emotional moments; if I walk out of the theater and I’m actually changed, you know what I mean? You know, you see the world in a different way. That’s the power of movies, to me. Like, when you go in and you saw the world one way, but when you walk out, I’m like, “I saw the world in a whole different way.” And Adrien Brody’s performance really taught me what an actor should do and should be. He gave everything he had. It was an awesome performance, an awesome movie, and I would just encourage everybody to see that one. That’s one of my favorite movies of all time. I bought that sucker; I got it on Blu-Ray, you know? [laughs]"

"Along with Airplane, An American Werewolf in London, and Raising Arizona, this film is one that I can silently mouth along with every single line of. I don’t know if Reiner, Guest, McKean, and Shearer could have ever known back in 1984 quite how far-reaching the influence of this movie would be. As a British director who made his start in TV comedy, I can vouch for the fact that this film is one of the key texts for every single UK comedy writer, actor, and director of my generation. The fact that it was performed by American actors doing killer English accents just makes that all the more impressive and ironic. So I cannot overestimate its position as an unassailable comedy classic. Along with Monty Python’s Life of Brian (also on Criterion) and Mike Leigh’s 1976 TV movie Nuts in May, it really became one of those movies that create strong bonds in creative partnerships. You either liked Spinal Tap or you were not worth talking to; it became that simple. And quite right too. It’s eighty-four minutes of comedy heaven."