All That Jazz

“Do you guys have All That Jazz? This is actually my favorite movie of all time. Bob Fosse. I think this is the greatest movie ever made. People always ask, “If you could have dinner with somebody, who would it be?” Bob Fosse, except I wouldn’t want to go to dinner. I’d just want to dance.”

“Bob Fosse, All That Jazz. So I just watched this again quite recently, actually. It’s a work of absolute genius, in my opinion. And if you want to look at where a lot of modern editing gets its ideas from, just look at the sequences of him taking the pills, which are spread throughout it. I think that’s a great movie. Great, great, great, great, great, great movie. So this is one I am taking home.”

“Pairing it with the Bob Fosse movie All That Jazz. These are two sides of my favorite coins, my favorite genre. They’re movies that, you know, they start in a hospital bed. And of course, our friend Gideon, he’s in that bed in that middle space and Jessica Lange is upstairs in the rafters, and 'It’s showtime,' the movie begins. But it takes you back through his complicated life... I’m really indebted to these two films for everything I’ve thought of since.”

“All That Jazz. I thought that was where the song was from—it's not, that is Chicago, but to be honest that is what drew me in at first. I was like, 'Oh, I love that song All That Jazz.' I was really pleasantly surprised by this, if not a little shaken up by what happened. You can't really reveal anything in this as well, that's why it's kind of cool and I appreciate that.”

“I just saw this a few years ago, All That Jazz. I had that feeling of like, why did no one tell me about this? You know when it's like a movie was like made for you and it feels like it's been in your bones your whole life and you're just like, I can't believe I've just been wandering the Earth and none of my friends are good enough friends to have told me to watch this movie.”

“Interestingly, a totally different approach to movement here because obviously Fosse, choreographer, director... The movement isn't about how he moved the camera on in scenes... The dances are complex and they happen on stage and he would essentially capture all these different angles and the choreography for me happened in the editing room. The editing of Fosse is what's absolutely phenomenal. I also loved obviously Cabaret is a masterpiece and so is All That Jazz.”

“Another one of my probably top 5 favorite films, All That Jazz, Bob Fosse. This is an amazing film, also very 70s... This was one of the first films that really showed me the power of editing... To see the command that he had over filmmaking and editing and using it rhythmically the way he used dance and movement was really remarkable.”

“This is a film that I for some reason I always avoided this and I think it was just because I thought it was like a dance movie and for some reason even the title All That Jazz, it was something that always... I finally saw this maybe two months ago and I was like just a mess by the end of the movie just like in tears. I think it's one of the best movies ever about being an artist and it's definitely one of the best movies ever about time management and its effect on the human body.”

“I'd like to have All That Jazz because when we were shooting Circle of Deceit in Beirut, once a week we got dailies sent from the lab in Paris and we went to a still working local cinema in the mid of the Civil War and all the time they were playing All That Jazz. It became like our leitmotif during the shoot: 'Bye-bye Happiness, I think I'm going to die,' which was exactly how we felt like often.”

“All That Jazz. Bob Fosse.”

“All That Jazz. Okay, this is the best movie. No, okay, there's all these lists like best movie musical, destroy them. All That Jazz, best movie musical. No one knows how to shoot dance anymore... Fosse knows what movement looks like on camera because he is movement incarnate. This film is so honest and beautiful and rich. It is everything a film should be. I love it. Watch it.”

“First All That Jazz which is one of my all-time favorite films. It's wonderful in every way. I mean it's got an incredible sense of rhythm in the way that it's edited, but it's also the musical numbers, it's the fact that it's autobiographical. It's sort of very present in the way for Bob Fosse. I'm going to have to take that. It's just I love it and I don't own the DVD and one of the things that I adore about Criterion DVDs... I love the notebooks that come with the DVDs.”

“I'm working on a Montgomery Clift film and we keep going back and forth between Raging Bull and All That Jazz as both biopics. This film is obviously the manic version of an individual's life.”

“Oh, got it. Yeah, this movie is so... I saw this movie when it came out and thought, 'Jesus, this is amazing.' And look at this, about show business and what a great world to be in and how unbelievably romantic it was. Even his death is incredibly sexy, Scheider's death. Now I happen to watch it recently and it's just terrifying to watch it as a middle-aged man. It's absolutely terrifying because nothing is romantic and the death, you feel like you're having a heart attack.”