Matthew Modine

“This is an amazing movie. Stanley Kubrick told me that when I was this age I should do a remake of this movie. It's an Akira Kurosawa movie called High and Low with Toshiro Mifune. And it's a story about a man who worked his way up from shoe factory, making shoes, to becoming an executive at the shoe company. And then his child is kidnapped, or so he thinks. The kidnapper took the wrong child. They kidnapped his butler, his servant, the person that works in his house, they kidnapped the wrong child. Soon then he's faced with the moral dilemma: what do I do? Do it's not, you know, it's a it's a great movie.”

“Where's Tanner? Robert Altman, who I had the pleasure working with three times. I did a play with him in London at the Old Vic, an Arthur Miller play, and I did one of the films that's in the Criterion Collection, Short Cuts. I'm not sure where that is, but Short Cuts. And I had the great pleasure of working with Julianne Moore amongst all the other brilliant actors that are in it. But this is amazing, this Tanner '88, because what Robert Altman did was follow the an election that was taking place, and the brilliant Michael Murphy, he pretended to be a politician that was running for office. I think at sometimes he actually felt that he really was running for office.”

“This is amazing. This is The Black Stallion. This is directed by Carroll Ballard. Carroll Ballard, I had the pleasure of working on a movie that Francis Ford Coppola, he produced this, Francis Ford Coppola, and he produced the movie that I made with him called Wind. And Wind is about the America's Cup, and I had the pleasure of working with the most amazing sailors in the in the world. And it was it's a it's a beautiful Carroll Ballard, this is a beautiful movie, The Black Stallion. And Carroll Ballard is best, he's the best filmmaker when the actors are not speaking. That he's like a documentary filmmaker that that captures moments rather than tries trying to create moments.”

“Here's another film by my friend Stanley Kubrick, who I worked with on Full Metal Jacket. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Stanley said that he told me that he wanted to make a movie that was a serious movie about the doomsday machine and about nuclear proliferation and nuclear warfare and the terrifying aspects of it. But the more he did research, the more he realized how stupid the entire thing was, and that you couldn't make a serious movie about this because the absurdity of human behavior and in human the industrial military complex was it was so ridiculous that the only way that you could really make a good movie about the nuclear war and nuclear bombs was to make a comedy.”

“Night of the Living Dead. My father was a drive-in theater manager, and I watched this movie in the projection booth of the drive-in. It was called the Highland in Salt Lake City, Utah. And I was much, much too young to have seen this film, and it damaged my at least 10 years of my childhood of just being scared to death that these zombies were going to come out and start consuming my flesh.”

“Midnight Cowboy. This played at my father's drive-in. This is directed by John Schlesinger, and Midnight Cowboy, when it came out, it was rated X, and it played at my dad's drive-in. So I told you we were living in Utah, and this movie, the Mormons threw my dad and our family out of Utah basically because of this movie.”

“Here's another Robert Altman title, The Player, that Tim Robbins was in with Greta Scacchi and an unbelievable cast of actors from show business that Robert, everybody wanted to work with Robert Altman because he was so cool, and working on his sets, that the freedom that he allowed actors to have, the experience was just like not working on anybody else's movie.”