"Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Again, very fantastical, very transporting and mysterious, and Jean Marais’ performance as the beast is wonderful. I wanted to have that sound to my voice when I did Moonstruck, and then Norman Jewison got very upset with me and lost his patience with it and almost fired from the movie. He called me on Christmas Eve to tell me that the dailies weren’t working, because he said, “You gotta drop the Jean Marais. I don’t want you sounding like [inaudible] talk like that in the character,” but the irony is that John Patrick Shanley told me that when he originally wrote Moonstruck the title was The Wolf and the Bride, so I thought there was some connection there."

"I read it first as an 18-year old and, just like a meteor from a distant galaxy, it hit my tender young brain and dug its way deep into its gray material. It has nestled there ever since, radiating with beauty and wonder, irony and horror. This autumn I visited the ground zero of The Master and Margarita, the famous Patriarch Ponds in Moscow where Lucifer himself, in the guise of the Professor Woland, makes his first appearance in the book and sets the whole story in motion. For a second I wondered if he would come for me too. But then I remembered that Old Nick owned my soul already, having given it as a toy to Bulgakov all those years ago."

"One of my favorites. It’s my two-year-old daughter’s favorite movie. She’s the green gargantua and my other son is the brown one, and she loves being the bad green gargantua. She’s obsessed with it, as I was. I grew up watching Japanese science fiction movies and I particularly, unlike most hard core film people, like dubbed movies — there’s something about that language and the translation that somehow fits into the movie; it’s like a weird poetry. There’s a beauty to these films, the Japanese character designs — there’s a human kind of quality to these things, which I love. Monsters were always the most soulful characters. I don’t know if it’s because the actors were so bad, but the monsters were always the emotional focal point"

"It’s this old Hollywood musical variety show type of thing. Really epic Technicolor. There’s an Esther Williams thing in there where she’s just swimming and being beautiful. It’s a beauty-based film. All the money wasn’t popped into special effects, obviously. It was popped into building really grand sets, really great costumes, really, really good makeup. Like, whatever. I saw that in college. One of my friends showed it to me in his apartment. I was like, “What the f— is this?” And then I bought the DVD and [now] I toss it in once a month, at least in the background. I don’t really actually follow the movie straight through. I just kinda fast-forward to the parts that look cool."

"Probably my favorite book of all time because of the truthful, raw language—it sounds so modern. To think that it was written almost seventy-five years ago at the end of World War II seems both astounding and inevitable. Plain, honest communication and wild, spontaneous beauty were all that was left after they’d cleared away the rubble. Enter Holden Caulfield, an off-kilter personality balancing an unlikely mix of cruelty, kindness, truth, acceptance and rebellion in one rather average noggin. Holden represents a new type of heartthrob, presaging the bored, hyper-vigilant James Dean types of later cinema—the romantic nihilists, capable of loving fiercely in the moment but standing equally aloof from and critiquing their own emotions. The dawning of the age of emo."

"Mentally, Casablanca connects with my world. It’s very romantic, about giving and testing, and trusting and loving… And there’s the romantic music. Everything is [in line with] my tastes of romance. It’s also about an unfulfilled love, which makes everything more beautiful because you can’t have it. It’s just human nature. If you have it — you see the person, you see the romance — then the story becomes practical, like reality. But because it’s unfulfilled, it’s always a fantasy because we add so much of our own beauty, and romance, and poetry, into it. Also, Casablanca is about the sacrifice of giving love. Real love, I think, is unconditional; you give your love away to love somebody. Otherwise it’s not real love, it’s possessive, it’s ownership."

"Freely adapted from a story by Hans Christian Andersen. It’s a must for anyone interested in the art of
 film. It always seems to me a work of true madness about a descent into madness. Original and timeless, it’s also a glorious celebration of classical
 ballet and the pain and effort it takes to make it. The matchless beauty of 
Moira Shearer is captured by the cinematography of Jack Cardiff, and Anton
 Walbrook (as the impresario of the ballet company) gives an unforgettable 
performance, one that alone is worth the price of admission. The film is a
 transcendent experience, and the Criterion Blu-ray gives new luster to
 the imagery and sound. You need to see this, unless, like me, you’ve
 already watched it endlessly."

"Both films reinvent what movies can do. What Rosi and Kiarostami do with Miguelín and Sabzian is such higher-power filmmaking, so modern, so romantic, and so influential. I saw The Moment of Truth in the theater through one of Janus’s runs of restored films. I remember the feeling in my stomach, the horrific beauty and love affair Miguelín had with the bulls and life itself. I remember the devastation and the constant reminder that Miguelín was actually Miguelín. The triumph of both films rests in their cinematic qualities; of course, Rosi surpasses Close-up here in portraying the moments of truth in Techniscope. Close-up is an utter masterpiece, and I didn’t feel the need to even bother writing about it. Like God."

"Both films reinvent what movies can do. What Rosi and Kiarostami do with Miguelín and Sabzian is such higher-power filmmaking, so modern, so romantic, and so influential. I saw The Moment of Truth in the theater through one of Janus’s runs of restored films. I remember the feeling in my stomach, the horrific beauty and love affair Miguelín had with the bulls and life itself. I remember the devastation and the constant reminder that Miguelín was actually Miguelín. The triumph of both films rests in their cinematic qualities; of course, Rosi surpasses Close-up here in portraying the moments of truth in Techniscope. Close-up is an utter masterpiece, and I didn’t feel the need to even bother writing about it. Like God."