GQ: You've got to do one more movie. ... Your hero James Cagney was retired forever and then came back to do Ragtime. Can't you do one more?

Hackman: [laughs] Well...

GQ: Why do you love Cagney so much? 

Hackman: There was a kind of energy about him, and he was totally different from anyone I'd ever seen in my life. Having been brought up in the Midwest, I didn't know those New York people. I thought he was terrific. Everything he did had a life to it. He was a bad guy in most of the films, and yet there was something lovable about him and creative.

-- from an interview between Gene Hackman and Michael Hainey, GQ magazine, June 1, 2011