I used to watch 'Coming to America' every day after school. I have full-on long-running inside jokes with friends and family about different scenes in that movie alone. Also, my brother and I loved 'The Golden Child,' so, yeah: I was a huge fan of Eddie Murphy growing up.
Everyone on 'The Goonies' and everyone on 'Lord Of The Rings' knew that we were a part of something that was going to be big.
I was born in 1950, so there were tons of Westerns on TV by the time I was 6, 7, 8 years old. In terms of television, 'Maverick' and 'Have Gun - Will Travel.' But filmically, classics like 'High Noon' and 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' - that's one of my favorite films.
If you need to do a movie where you have an army of 10,000 soldiers, that's a very difficult thing to shoot for real. It's very expensive, but as computer graphics techniques make that cheaper, it'll be more possible to make pictures on an epic scale, which we haven't really seen since the '50s and '60s.
In 1994, nobody could have predicted 'Shawshank' would one day be an iconic movie - and believe me, that would never have happened if Danny Glover had been Red instead of Morgan Freeman.
I love 'An American in Paris.' That's the one for me. Some of the visual ideas in that film are just haunting and very free.
I was reared on American TV and films. There was a huge sense of occasion about going to the cinema in Moy in the late 1950s and early '60s, and I absolutely loved those Hollywood sword-and-sandal movies like Ben-Hur and the dime-a-dozen cowboy-and-Indian films, as we then referred to them.
Comparing 'Christmas Vacation' to 'It's A Wonderful Life' is the silliest thing. That film starred the greatest movie actor of all time, and the idea that our movie could ever be connected in some fashion to something so brilliant and beautiful always made feel like, 'That's all they had to write about?'
When I was a kid, I used to watch all those Sunday afternoon matinees featuring all the Hollywood greats.
What I fell in love with as a child was 'My Fair Lady,' 'Funny Face,' 'American in Paris,' and 'Singin' in the Rain.' Just perfect movies to me and I was dancing. I started ballet when I was three. And I fell in love with those movies and fell in love with Audrey Hepburn and Leslie Caron.
I love all sorts of movies, whether made by Scorsese or Frank Capra. I love them all.
You think of movies like 'Midnight Run' and '48 Hours', those are great movies, especially 'Midnight Run.'
When I started watching movies, I saw a lot of Hitchcock films. When I was 10, I saw 'North by Northwest' and movies like that.
When I was putting the 'Best of Hollywood' book together, I sat down and added up just the list of Westerns I've done, and it came to well over 200.
For me, my mythology growing up was 'Raiders Of The Lost Ark' and 'Star Wars' and 'E.T.' and 'Ghostbusters.' That's what I grew up on, and there aren't many people who can write that kind of scale of story, stories that are that big.
The Midnight Palace is a great place on the web for the very best on Hollywood Classics!
One of the first movies my dad took me to see was the original 'Road Warrior.' And I was kind of raised on the action movies of that era: 'The Terminator' and 'Die Hard' and, of course, all of the 'Star Wars' movies.
I grew up loving the John Wayne and Clint Eastwood westerns.
I always wanted to play a boxer because some of my favorite films, as a boy, were those great boxing movies, like 'Raging Bull', 'Rocky', 'The Set Up', 'Fat City and Hard Times'. I just loved those films.
I like 'Citizen Kane,' I like 'The Godfather,' all the ones that everyone should see, whether you're an actor or not.
I loved 'Rocky' and 'Rambo', and am very proud of them.
It rekindles the great Hollywood romances.
But what I really like are old Hollywood movies. Very often I watch AMC.
I'm a big Broadway fan and a big MGM fan.
I was pretty lucky to have grown up during the 'Star Wars,' 'Indiana Jones' and 'E.T.' years.
