"This annoyed me at the time - like Animal House - because it was not historical. It was smearing late seventies ideas of street credibility over sixties mod. I thought it very doubtful that a top face would be working at a scrap yard, for instance. But who cares? I've seen it many times since and it's an excellent teen movie: a great soundtrack, strong cast - a new generation of actors like Ray Winstone, Phil Davies, Mark Wingett and Phil Daniels, who would go on to have lustrous careers - and an archetypal loner-vs-the-gang storyline. It's noticeable that as Jimmy gets weirder, he gets more androgynous. As the film goes on, the activities of the gang get so tiresome you don't blame him for breaking away."

"Kubrick was a fearsome intellect. His approach to filmmaking and storytelling remains as mysterious at it is compelling. The illusion of control over the medium is total. Both films speak eloquently about the scale of a man against the tide of history, and both raise the bar for every “historical” film to follow. Paths of Glory is a searing indictment of the war machine, as pertinent now as it was in its day. I suspect, however, that Kubrick was also a highly instinctive director, and that he grasped incessantly for his films. An anecdote tells us of him begging Kirk Douglas to stay in bed a few more days after an accident, because Kubrick was using the “downtime” to understand the film they were making."