When I was a teenager, you wanted to go to the movies. Go and see 'Mean Streets,' go and see 'The Conversation,' go and see 'Taxi Driver.'
Truth be told, actually, my favorite director of the Movie Brats was not Scorsese. Loved him. But my favorite director of the Movie Brats was Brian de Palma. I actually met De Palma right after I'd done 'Reservoir Dogs,' and I was very beside myself.
I'm very influenced by documentary filmmaking and independent filmmaking, by a lot of noir and films from the '40s. Those are my favorite. And then, filmmaking from the '70s is a big influence for me.
If I was ever gonna remake a Peckinpah film, it would be 'Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia.' That's my favorite Peckinpah film.
It was a time after 'Lady Sings the Blues' and 'Mahogany' and all those romantic movies: I became this romantic figure on the street in a very special way.
I imagine it was much different in the 1970s. That was the Renaissance for black actors, albeit in blaxploitation movies. There was a much greater preponderance of work then than there is now.
I was very influenced by the films of the '70s.
The whole idea of making 'James' was to make an action film in the style of the 1970s and '80s.
Our love of kung fu goes back to the Bruce Lee days in the 1970s. Outside the action, we loved the interesting, heartfelt stories and the dialogue. It was RZA's idea to draw all that in there as samples.
'Death Sentence' really is a throwback to the '70s style revenge drama with moments of action. It's like a contemporary 'Death Wish' with a much more thriller style storyline, but the action scenes I shot very much in the style of '70s films like 'The French Connection.'
One of my favourite films is called 'Lacombe Lucien,' directed by Louis Malle. The lead character in that film, like the lead characters in many '70s and '80s films, has a moral ambiguity to him.
Back in the 1970s, it was mostly all-black audiences coming into the theaters. So, we presented stories they could relate to.
Hal Ashby is one of my favorite filmmakers.
There's no question that the '70s themselves were really wide open. There was just so much being done at that time. Every year, the major studios were commissioning things that they would never touch today or even thought of touching in the 1950s.
'Hester Street' was my most complete character study, but 'Annie Hall' and 'The Last Detail' were also great.
There was a golden era in film-making in Hollywood back in the 1970s, and although there is some great independent film-making in America, it's actually very hard to get independent films made in the United States. It's much more feasible from Europe.
People love to talk about how the '70s are the only time they made movies about characters, and adult movies, and complicated people. But in the '80s, they got away with some of those too.
I saw all those great '70s films when I was 9, and no one in my Brooklyn neighborhood cared if a kid watched an R movie.
I'm a child of that, the 'Bonnie and Clyde' to 'Raging Bull' period, you know. Those are the films that heightened my interest in acting and movies and everything.
Like, I'm a big fan of films from the '70s, like Cassavetes and things, where they just keep the dialogue really loose and just kind of roll, you know what I mean?
I was thinking 'Love Story', obviously, was a romantic film of that time.
I think 'Death Race 2000' is a classic, but it's a classic from the 1970s, and I think it's a particular kind of drive-in-exploitation movie satire masterpiece, and it was very much a movie of its time.
I wish I had been born 20 years earlier, so I could have been in the movie business in the 1970s.
I had those kind of parents where I watched all of these very sophisticated movies: 'Five Easy Pieces', 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.'
CGI has fully ruined car crashes. Because how can you be impressed with them now? When you watch them in the '70s, it was real cars, real metal, real blasts. They're really doing it and risking their lives. But I knew CGI was gonna start taking over.
