"Both the film and the book had a big impact on me when I was a kid. I don’t remember how old I was when I first watched it, but the film was told from the perspective of a young boy who is experiencing the adult world and discovering that it’s horrifying. I remember specific scenes that have an impact on me more than the film does in general. There’s one in which the characters are fishing for eels in the sea—that scene has affected me in such a way that I have never eaten eel since. Not long ago I showed the film to my brother’s young son, and I was looking at his face and his experience watching it, and I realized that it could have the same impact on this generation growing up now—he was horrified! But at the same time, it’s fascinating"

"I edited Scott Pilgrim on Charlotte Street in London. Two key Peeping Tom locations were outside the door of my workplace: the passageway where a doomed prostitute picks up Mark Lewis in the opening sequence, and the newsagent above which he takes adult photographs. I had seen Peeping Tom two or three times before but finally watched it on the big screen when I was working in its locale. Michael Powell’s film had always haunted and intrigued me, but seeing the streets that I traversed every day on-screen from fifty years earlier had a darkly powerful effect on me. Even though the film is a work of fiction, my walk home would never be the same again. I would think about Peeping Tom every day, and beyond that, the ghosts of Fitzrovia: dark doings behind closed doors, grim secrets at the tops of narrow staircases."

"I think when you ask for favorite films, you’re really asking “favorite films at 15” — you know what I’m saying? Formative favorite films. I don’t think they really change much. You sort of can’t argue with your inner 13-year-old that watched something 25,000 times. Now I’ll see something adult and be affected by it — like A Separation, which I saw and I loved — but it’s gonna be hard to top those 25,000 viewings when you were 13. You get past pubescence and it’s cooked. Put a fork in it, your favorite films is done. [Laughs] Don’t hold me to it. The English Patient: Oh my gosh, it was just so affecting when I saw it. The performances are impeccable. The sense of time and place; everything about it. It’s really one of those kinds of epics — like Lawrence of Arabia is an epic. You rarely see epics any more."