"One of the greatest players to ever pick up the guitar. Oddly enough, he started out as a drummer. Figure that one out. Not only that, but he was left-handed and a lot of the time he played right-handed models flipped upside-down. “Albert had been releasing singles for quite a while, since the mid-‘50s, but he’s probably best known for the phenomenal recordings he did for Stax in the ‘60s. This was his second album for Stax, and even though it’s comprised of singles, it works as a whole album. “And dig the backing band - Booker T And The MGs. You can’t ask for much more. Again, I call this album part of the ‘Mississippi mystery.’ How did Albert King get that sound? I don’t know. But it’s all right here. Songs like Born Under A Bad Sign, Crosscut Saw, The Hunter…man, they’re just the coolest. Guitar players who want to study a one-of-a-kind tone and hear a man who really knew how to bend a note can’t go wrong with Albert King.”"

"Ranks with the best of Hitchcock, who wanted to make it but Clouzot beat him to the rights. It was made in the same year as Night and Fog and The Night of the Hunter, 1955—what a year, what a decade for world cinema. The penultimate scene had the same effect on me as Psycho. Though it no longer holds surprises for me, I watch it for its mastery of suspense and the performances of Paul Meurisse, Simone Signoret, and
 Véra Clouzot. But I confess that the nine-minute scene without words where 
Véra hears noises from her bedroom, goes down the hall to check them out, and is literally scared to death still nails me. You can bet I thought 
about how it was shot and paced when I sent Ellen Burstyn up to that attic in The Exorcist. No nudity, no sexuality, no violence, just pure, slow-building suspense that escalates to terror. The original novel was written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who also wrote Vertigo."

"Oh, oh, Night of the Hunter. That’s just a film that… It was actually recommended to me by Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson’s wife. I think it’s her favorite film of all time. I’d never really seen anything like it because it’s kind of a film noir set in the South. The story, it’s about a family who are terrorized by a con-man. Robert Mitchum was an incredible actor — the original Cape Fear is another incredible performance by him — but it’s such a slimy performance in this film. He’s such a great manipulator and tells tall tales. And it’s famous because he’s got these tattoos on his knuckles of “love” and “hate” and it actually is a conduit for a really great story that he repeats throughout the film. The cinematography’s incredible; it’s just like all blacks and whites and hard shadows and lots of silhouettes along the river. It’s just a stunning, a stunning film! It’s really good. Talking about these movies makes me want to see these movies again. [laughing] They’re so good!"