- The Observer,
- Sunday February 6 2000
Spike Lee
The greatest closing shot is in Billy Wilder's Ace In The Hole, where Kirk Douglas drops dead in front of the camera. Billy Wilder! His work is amazing. Another scene is Elia Kazan's On The Waterfront where Brando has to walk to the line-up. I'm very glad that I'm friends with Waterfront screenwriter Budd Shulberg. And then there's the 'Tonight' quartet in West Side Story
Bryan Singer
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind when the alien mothership lands. It's one of the great commercial art movies of all time. The scene tells a magnificent story while at the same time not really telling us what is going on. It is speaking through music. You don't know why the spaceship has taken the people, why it is returning them. You don't know who the aliens are. You don't understand any of those things, but for some reason it all seems to make sense. You feel an experience rather than being told what it is you should think or feel. But I have to admit that it is partly born out of my love of special effects and a fascination with life on other planets.
Michael Mann
I'd like to have done the war room scenes with those spectacular sets in Dr Strangelove and I would change nothing. I especially like all the stuff with Peter Sellers. I just crack up whenever I see it. I just marvel at it. It's a brilliant combination of a sense of doom and foreboding and dark comedy at the same time. It's so extreme and out there. There's such spectacular invention happening. I'd also probably have liked to do the last scene in Casablanca and again I'd have changed nothing.
