"Going in a little different direction, Apocalypse Now is an unbelievable piece of cinema. Just the scale of the production and the performances. I feel like, narratively, it’s one of the… There’s a subgenre of Vietnam movies, obviously, and this one just feels so epic and operatic, in no small part because it uses Wagner’s Ring Cycle as the score for one of the great battle scenes. I don’t know, I can’t say enough about it. And then, of course, seeing Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about it. That just made me love it even more, because you can see the creative depth that Coppola went to, the depth of his soul that he dug into to not just make the movie and keep it together, but to sort of fight for coherence in a chaotic production, and I love the discovery. I mean, clearly, when Brando showed up on set, it was such a disaster, because he didn’t know his lines and he was a hundred pounds overweight or something, and he basically refused to learn his lines. But then Coppola worked with what he had, and to me that is the most… He wound up with something genius and more coherent than what may have even been on the page originally. There’s a quote by Orson Welles that the absence of limitations is the enemy of art, and I feel like Apocalypse Now is a kind of great tribute to that idea, because Coppola just faced so much adversity making the movie. Not just Coppola, the cast, the crew, everybody faced so much and dealt with so much and then created this transcendent piece of cinema that captures a dark piece of world conflict history and some very intimate stories of young people sucked into it, and then, of course, a meditation on the darkness of the human soul, which is an important thing to explore artistically from time to time."

"With Patton, understanding the second World War is required spiritual learning for anyone born in the later 20th century going forward. You know, I could list 50 films, but that one… There’s something about the mantle of celebrity, mixed with a really good rendering of military tactics, and finally, George C. Scott’s performance… I mean, really, if you look at them, it’s Ben Kingsley and George C. Scott that have me put them on the list, because they make those portraits feel so authentic. This idea that, “I’ve been here in countless guises before,” this hint at reincarnation, if you will, and destiny. This questing for destiny is something I feel in my life. I’m put here at this moment, in this time, when social media is doing what it’s doing, and filmmaking has reached this kind of new zenith, and I feel like everything I’ve been born and raised and taught and experienced has put me here for a particular reason, and I just know it’s gotta be something. The fact that Patton feels that, this quest for destiny, that he’s supposed to be doing something… You know, the actual morality of war… Karl Malden’s character, who’s nowhere near the forceful personality and couldn’t probably whip a battalion into shape in the way that Patton does — you need both guys. But ultimately when it goes on, Patton doesn’t know when to stop, and I love that they dramatize that. He’s being interviewed and he talks about the Russians, that he should just keep going and fight the Russians — “We’re going to have to fight that war sooner or later” — and oh, guess what? In the news today is this Crimea issue, and you sort of go, “Boy, what does that mean? How are we going to relearn that lesson?” So there’s just so much stuff wrapped around it that’s relevant and interesting, and it’s a story well-told. Just the way they set up the conflict and everything, I love it, love it, love it."