"Spartacus is a great movie, too. It’s also one of those epic pictures. The story is great. I think what’s cool is you had a young director. The fact that he had to walk on there — Kubrick was in his 20s and they fired the original director, and it was produced by Kirk Douglas, so being a star producer — I can kind of relate to that. He brought this kid on set, and didn’t really know him. He turned out to be this incredible genius who did these incredible battle scenes, and just some beautiful stuff in there with real extras — they had 5,000 extras. If you call “Cut! Reset!,” it took half a day to put everybody back in their positions. That’s an accomplishment, I think. Scale, but also keeping it intimate in those close-ups. Also, they said that [Kubrick] always designed the last shot of his movies first. He tried to sum up the whole picture in the last shot of the movie, like Dr. Strangelove. The guy sitting on the bomb, falling down. That’s a classic shot. In Spartacus, it was Spartacus hanging on the cross being crucified, and there’s a row of crosses leading all the way to Rome, I guess, to the horizon. Then his son is born a free man at his feet, and his wife says, “Spartacus, please die.” Because he was so tough, he wouldn’t die on the cross. She’s asking him to die, while she’s sitting there with his son who is free now. He’s not a slave anymore. Anyways, it’s a beautiful movie."

"There are certain movies that I always go back to, but before I make a movie, I always find myself watching The Last Detail, the Hal Ashby movie. There’s something about it that’s so alive. It’s one of the first movies to really have frank language. I think it was somewhat shocking at the time. It was the first movie where everyone aggressively cursed, but it was about people in the armed services. It’s also a small story that’s very intimate and you just fall in love with all these characters that are in this terrible situation. I always watch it because Hal Ashby shot it in such a way that it just feels real. It’s almost like a documentary. I like how he paces the scenes, the coverage, and I always go back to it because it reminds me that the most important thing I can do as a filmmaker is convince the audience that what they’re watching is really happening. I don’t want them to be aware of me. So that’s one movie. It’s both heartbreaking and hilarious, which is always my favorite combination."

"I was at NYU film school when I first saw If…. The second time was the very next day, when I brought friends and classmates to share this extraordinary movie experience. I have always harbored fantasies of blowing up my high school, but until If…. I never realized that I was not the only one. Obviously If…. was a huge influence on Rock ’n’ Roll High School. In the mid-1980s, I wrote an article about high school movies for American Film magazine in which I opined that If…. was the greatest of them all. A month later, I received a lovely letter from Lindsay Anderson, my hero (I also love O Lucky Man!). We corresponded for several years, finally meeting at the Telluride Film Festival. He called me “a movie brat typical of my generation” for preferring The Searchers to She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. (I treasure his criticism.) Wrapped in a scarf, Malcolm McDowell is as riveting and charismatic as ever in his screen debut. I showed the movie to my teenage daughters, who only know Malcolm as Linderman on Heroes, and it impressed a whole new generation of rebellious teens. If….’s DVD extras, especially “O Lucky Malcolm,” really capture the spirit of the man and the movie."

"I would also put The King of Comedy. Certainly in my top three movies ever. I mean, it’s not underrated any more, because I think it’s certainly thought of as a classic movie, but at the time, it bombed like so many great movies did. I mean, it didn’t even get good reviews, which is insane. Like, I don’t know what its percentage it would have been on Rotten Tomatoes in 1983 when it came out. It’s such a great movie. And I think it’s sort of an endlessly fascinating subject, this sort of quest for celebrity, and the feeling that some have when they have it, which is just discontentment, and showing both sides of that fence really, really harshly. Jerry Lewis is just astounding in that movie."