You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level—but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point.

If Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda had a baby, it would be Matthew Modine.

It's crazy how you can get yourself in a mess sometimes and not even be able to think about it with any sense and yet not be able to think about anything else.

You're constantly changing man. But the film's not changing. The film stays the same. That's the beautiful aspect of it.

Sanitised violence in movies has been accepted for years. What seems to upset everybody now is the showing of the consequences of violence.

In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the horror genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials.

All my life I've always spoiled the things that meant the most to me.