"This is art concealing art. On the face of it, the film is a gentle satire of French bourgeois life on holiday. There is no story, just Hulot (Jacques Tati himself) drifting innocently through a holiday resort, leaving a trail of confusion behind him. The gags are wonderful, apparently effortless, the situations natural. In reality, the film is the extraordinary creation of a man obsessed with perfection. Each move, each image was planned in detail by Tati until the gags were immaculate; the tennis ball that bounces off the head of the serious little girl curtsying to her elders, the paint pot that floats out to sea, then back on the opposite side of the beached fishing boat; everything apparently natural, everything the product of intense creativity."

"Because of Malcolm McDowell I’m gonna go into A Clockwork Orange, because that was the other great teenage performance, along with James Dean in East of Eden. Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of the subject of violence and the mystery of nature and to go against out natures and what is or isn’t necessary, and what is the true evil, and all of these questions that came out of the absurdist and evocative film that is Clockwork Orange, again, is everlasting. And also his lighting: even today when you look at some of the stills from the movie, when they’re in the Milk Bar, it looks like virtual reality and I don’t know how he did it — he was really a master of light."

"The whole range of arguments in that book is quite radical and complex and beautiful. It’s the first book I’ve read by an author, masculine or feminine, that has a defiance of the situation, which is deeply subversive in the holy sense – it’s other-worldly. She says that this world is stained by human misconception, that men and women have wrong ideas – even if they are ten million years old and come from the mouth of god, they are still wrong! The position in that book is so defiant and passionate that she creates another reality and just might be able to manifest it. It’s from that kind of appetite, with the way things are that new worlds arise, so I have deep admiration for Andrea Dworkin."

"Mentally, Casablanca connects with my world. It’s very romantic, about giving and testing, and trusting and loving… And there’s the romantic music. Everything is [in line with] my tastes of romance. It’s also about an unfulfilled love, which makes everything more beautiful because you can’t have it. It’s just human nature. If you have it — you see the person, you see the romance — then the story becomes practical, like reality. But because it’s unfulfilled, it’s always a fantasy because we add so much of our own beauty, and romance, and poetry, into it. Also, Casablanca is about the sacrifice of giving love. Real love, I think, is unconditional; you give your love away to love somebody. Otherwise it’s not real love, it’s possessive, it’s ownership."

"A truly inspiring movie. Kurosawa is one of those rare directors who knows how to tell a story in the compelling way we all like to see them told on-screen. In Ikiru, we, as individual viewers, so identify with the moment-to-moment experience of the main character (played by the great Takashi Shimura) that somehow it becomes our own story. As we watch this movie, we progressively go through bouts of fear and guilt and then, by movie’s end, achieve a sad satisfaction coupled with the personal conviction that we must somehow do better as human beings. This one becomes even more moving as we get older and the story becomes closer to our own reality. This one puts me through the ringer every time."

"Philip Gourevitch has written a riveting book about the Rwandan genocide and the title is part of a note to his pastor from a man who knew he was going to be killed the next day. This book examines the darkest side of human beings. As the mother of many children, including seven sons I realise the importance of bringing up my sons to find peaceful resolutions to conflict – the reality is that it is men who are the violent perpetrators. This killing component is very likely responsible for the survival of the human species over many, many centuries. But now our weaponry has succeeded our wisdom and we have not evolved away from the brutality that was useful to early human beings."