"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."

"Ivan the Terrible, Part 1. Sergei M. Eisenstein. Mainly because he shot it during the middle of the second world war, and he had thousands of extras to choose from. It was one of those movies made during, of course, the second world war. Stalin had absolute power, which means that they could literally do anything with this production. Their production was epic on a scale that’s never been seen before because they were using — sort of very freely — prisoners of war for these big scenes. But the end result is the film is an extraordinary interpretation of what Ivan the Terrible, Part 1, is. It’s extraordinary for a myriad of different reasons, but one of those reasons is it was made during the second world war, and you can see aspects of it that we don’t really see about the world at that time. Do you know what I mean? Eisenstein was very cleverly able to mirror Stalin, mirror Hitler, within the confines of that film — disguising it, of course,as Russian folklore to get the movie made. In fact, he probably sold it to Stalin like, “You are as great as Ivan the Terrible was!”Of course he was, but terrible also. It was a great way of being able to reflect the politics, the situation of Europe, the situation of the world at that time within the confines of the film. It’s a great film. Magnificent. His use of individualizing on individual characters is mind blowing. I’m sure every great director has studied it for weeks and weeks, months and months at a time in their lives."