"I, as a child, loved Mary Poppins. Something about these misunderstood kids who couldn’t catch a break, and this fantastic woman coming into their life and showing them this other world, and yet also being so coy: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What world do you mean?” I just really liked escapism as a child, I guess. The time element of Britain in another era, and then this fantastical element of going into pictures and cartoons and flying and laughing. It’s like it was so exciting to me, even though it came out 30 years before I was born. Something like that. It was a real go-to as a kid. In the last two and a half decades, it still works. It doesn’t drag. It’s still like the magic is still there. Whereas maybe other films from that era may or may not have aged quite as gracefully as Mary Poppins has."

"Cabaret from Mr. Fosse, initially, as well as Lenny — those two films seem to have made a very big impression on me. With Cabaret — I got a glimpse of it again on an airplane; it was offered in the classics section in the airplane that I was traveling in. And there were moments in that film where it seems he has created painting. For not even an entire second — or an entire half a second — you capture a glimpse of a “creature” that seemed to exist only in the world of a night club in Berlin in 1931. And it was still, but there was smoke coming up from the creature’s cigarette. Like the cartoons of George Grosz, there was a grotesqueness to some of the laughter, and he mixed what seemed to be an almost documentary-like reality combined with a very private story and also a kind of fantastical theatrical reality as well. The camera was always in fascinating spots, the sound creeped in, in ways that captured the subconscious level."