"What can be said about this movie that hasn’t already been said? Mike Nichols’s masterpiece precipitated the sixties youth movement in all its melancholic glory while also being a hilarious satire of contemporary consumer culture. My brother Jim has always been an early adopter of movie technology. The first Criterion release I ever remember seeing was the Graduate laserdisc in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen (we had seen the film previously only on a pan-and-scan VHS borrowed from our local library). It has one of the first commentary tracks I ever heard on a disc (maybe the first), by film scholar Howard Suber. I learned a lot about film analysis listening to that track in 1987. But the new Blu-ray also features one of Nichols’s many commentaries in conversation with the great Steven Soderbergh. They have done several together (Catch-22 and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and they are never less than fully engaging and fascinating. When making my own film, I took to heart Nichols’s assertion that “a movie is about something, but it is also about something else.” And in this new transfer, The Graduate has never looked or sounded better. Robert Surtees’s brilliant compositions are a touchstone of modern cinema. Often imitated, never duplicated. By casting Dustin Hoffman, Nichols also flipped the idea of what a leading man was and could be, and changed the history of cinema."

"I’ve started writing a lot of songs recently; I’ve always written but I put my writing on hiatus because Tim’s such a great songwriter for Keane and I think I felt a bit deflated by how good he was, but recently I’ve got back into it. Carole King, I don’t know why, but something about the way that she talks about her emotional world, I find really engaging. It’s romantic, in a way, in a broader sense, and just beautifully crafted. Every time I sit down and try and write a song, I have her somewhere in the back of my mind. The great songs have a real sense of precision, there’s no dead space, you know every bit’s there for a reason. I like 'So Far Away'; I grew up in a small town and I always found it annoying, even though I did this myself, that people would leave! Because they felt that’s what they had to do - I’m not annoyed with them, I’m annoyed that that’s the way of the world, you have to leave your roots. I suppose I did the same thing, it’s a necessity of modern society, but it frustrates me. I used to sit around thinking, "Where are all my old mates who used to live down the road?" And that song, its wistful longing for people to stay put in a world that’s growing so fast. It’s a timeless record"

"I saw this when I was in college, and there were a lot of things about it that made me swoon. I watched it over and over again. I couldn’t stop. It does this incredible thing where it stops the narrative, like Godard would, to comment on the story from an omniscient perspective. But where Godard does it in a really cold way, Cuarón does it with such warmth. It made me feel like you could do anything; you could stop your movie and do wild shit and still be incredibly emotionally engaging. The movie also depicts sexuality in a way that I’d never seen before. Long before our culture became obsessed with sexual fluidity and where people fall on the Kinsey scale, this movie said that it was just a reality that the intimacy between friends can also be sexual, that it’s not so cut and dry. It’s about the depth of a friendship, and it was just a revelation for me. That moment when the two men kiss was like, woah, that’s right and that’s real. And the cinematography is insane and showed how you can make beautiful images with so little. It’s a simple road movie about friends, but it’s so gorgeous. Why aren’t we elevating simple stories to the level of epics? Cuarón does that. All his movies are epics, no matter how small or big they are."