"…and then [in Mean Streets], Robert De Niro; his kind of twitchy reverence to this wonderfully insane underworld. Somehow, the two [films] will always be forever linked in my mind. Whoever programmed those two movies together… it was at a moment when, in an art context, I was beginning to make short films. So film was definitely becoming a medium that was intriguing to me, and I hadn’t quite made a complete transition yet, but I found those two films just extraordinary, and they opened up a kind of unimaginable landscape for me. That kind of great irreverence, and intensity, and strength of purpose in those characters."

"I’m not a big fan of action movies. I usually like dark movies, but that action movie was definitely one of my favorites. One of the top five. I love Tom Cruise, I love a lot of his films. And Emily Blunt, she played such a tight role. That movie is crazy. A lot of people actually try to make movies like that, where they re-live events until they correct it. It was almost like a movie that’s so insane that it can be realistic. I feel like, for some reason, I could put myself in those shoes. Like, “Whoa, this movie could be real,” you know what I mean?"

"Insane and amazing corporate nightmares. My dad took me to see this when I was only ten, which was maybe not the best parenting decision. I was already devouring all manner of movies by then, but I don’t think I’d seen anything that was so funny and so shocking at the same time. It’s a popular film, but it still strikes me as weirdly underrated and misunderstood. Oddly, the regular R-rated version is way more hard-hitting than this uncut one. It turns out the ultraviolent stuff they had to cut out of the movie was so over the top, it sort of made it goofy."

"Sirk’s assembled team of actors and craftspeople has never been better! Frank Skinner’s underrated score really carries this hurtling narrative from its first insane notes, dialing up the Euripidean melodramatics to levels worthy of the luridly saturated Technicolors lensed by Russell Metty. Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, Lauren Bacall (of that certain age long before any other Sirk heroine), and the impossible-to-carbon-date Dorothy Malone, in a helmet of dead hair, whirl around each other like a mobile in a gale, all the while perfectly delivering dialogue as confected as Alexander Golitzen’s decors. Hard to believe Rock’s muse, Ross Hunter, didn’t produce this one!"