"I’m going to be honest, since it’s just you and me here. I’d considered this my favorite film for many years. I hadn’t seen it in maybe five. When I came back to Los Angeles after our short hiatus on Jurassic World, I woke up early the first day of pre-production, still on Atlantic time. This movie was on Netflix, so I sat up in bed in a very nice hotel suite and watched it. The movie starts with a filmmaker in bed in a very nice hotel suite, who proceeds to remember his childhood and relationship with a great mentor and friend. I cried for two hours. Straight. It all unpacked right there and then. I got to our production office and my eyes were still red, my voice was gone. My producer, Pat Crowley, sat me down and asked if I’d been on a weekend bender. I hung my head and gave him the least embarrassing of the two available answers. “Yes.”"

"May he rest in peace, the lovely little angel. I love this song. Musically we only heard Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Enya when I was a child, there was nothing else as we didn’t have a radio. I love Enya as well, especially the way she just stays the same and doesn’t change her sound. She knows what she’s here to do and she does it. ""This was one of the songs that I really loved when I was unable to understand what he was saying, because I didn’t know English then, or at least I didn’t know these lyrics yet, because they were so complicated. I ended up learning my English mainly from online gaming or computer games like World Of Warcraft. “’Suzanne’ is my childhood, safety, my mother, discovering music and English and falling in love with a song again and again the more that I grow. It’s like a forever growing song, because it grows with you while you grow.”"

"I saw it at BAM in Brooklyn when they were doing a Schlöndorff retrospective, and I didn’t previously know much of his work but then got super obsessed with him. What’s cool about him is that his films are all totally different. The Tin Drum is a crazy epic story told through the perspective of this young boy, and the voice-over is incredible and takes you through his experience. A lot of people think the voice-over in We the Animals is a reference to Malick, but we’re actually referencing The Tin Drum. What I love about this movie and Ratcatcher is that they show an understanding of childhood sexuality, which you only really see in European films. The other thing that’s really important about The Tin Drum is the color palette. It has this incredibly vibrant, almost Technicolor palette. I showed the film to my DP and everybody that we worked with."

"The first movie that comes to my mind when somebody asks me about favorites is Searching for Bobby Fischer by Steve Zaillian. First of all, it’s a beautifully, beautifully shot and acted movie. I mean, the screenplay is brilliant, but more than anything, Conrad Hall shot the movie, and it’s one of the best performances I’ve seen by an actor of any age in a movie. The honesty and the presence of the lead kid in the movie is amazing. And every actor surrounding him is extraordinary, from Joan Allen, and Laurence Fishburne, Joe Mantegna, Ben Kingsley; Laura Linney plays like a one scene role in the movie. Like a virtually unknown at the time, Laura Linney. And just the story of father and son and the score is beautiful. It is inevitably one that I am always drawn to, and I think it’s filled with hope but also like a real darkness and the beauty of childhood."