"Kubrick has always been my keystone filmmaker. It was when I saw 2001 at age seven on opening weekend in New York that I first had my mind blown by a film. (And yes, I got to see the infamous nineteen minutes before they were cut!) I didn’t understand it, but I became obsessed with understanding it, dragging my poor dad back to it over and over. It changed my life . . . and I still have the Criterion laserdisc—my first Criterion purchase. The extras on the LD were—and still are—extraordinary, even if the picture quality has long been surpassed on Blu-ray. This film is why I’ve kept my rickety laserdisc player. (I’d love to see Criterion get ahold of 2001 again and what they could do with this greatest of all science-fiction films with modern 4K technology.) Paths of Glory was the second Kubrick film I saw, a couple of years later, when my dad took me to a revival house (I think it was the Carnegie Hall Cinema). He loved the film and its unflinching, humanist, antiwar stance, and it immediately became a huge touchstone for me. Its influence is all over my film A Midnight Clear, but I see it in other ways in almost everything I do. I was so excited when the Blu-ray was announced that I ordered two, so I could store one as a backup in case—God forbid—anything happened to my first copy and the disc went out of print."

"I know these are things that go back in time, but now coming up to date, we got 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now, the projecting forward of Arthur C. Clarke was just such a marvel of imagination, but not just guessing. I mean, he predicted that communication satellites would rotate at the same rate that the earth rotates. They’re in orbit traveling, so they sort of remain stationary over the equator. Now, that was a brilliant observation, and I think so many of these people — Isaac Asimov and H.G. Wells, all of these science fiction writers. In a way, it prompted me to think about creating imaginary situations in the past, in the present, and off into the future, being as true to reality as possible. It also predicted things that we would call today… It’s a cable that goes all the way up and out to geosynchronous. And that has fascinated a lot of people, and I’ve appreciated some engineering observations that I think were quite impractical, but Arthur Clarke projected building a tower all the way out there. 22,000 miles. Now, that’s pretty stretching. But I feel very satisfied since Arthur Clarke wrote an epilogue to the book that Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and I wrote with other people, First on The Moon, and Arthur Clarke wrote the epilogue to that. And because of his contributions and my appreciation of those and having met him on several occasions, I just was compelled to arrange a cruise so that I would get to spend a day with Arthur Clarke in 2001."