"What year was Blue Velvet? It was ’86, wasn’t it? So I was 15 when it came out and my parents were away for the summer, and they’d left me in the house alone. I got hold of a VHS copy of Blue Velvet, and I started watching it, and I couldn’t stop, and I got to the end of it, and rewound it, and played it again and again, 16 times over. And I watched it at least twice a day, every day, for that entire summer. You can see perhaps why obsessive behavior scares me. And it just blew my mind. I knew that cinema could be poetic, but I never had before understood that it could be poetic in that way, in such a raw and visceral way. And again, scared the living crap out of me. So there seems to be a theme running through here."

"That always sticks in my mind; Timothy Hutton, Mary Tyler Moore. Isn’t it devastating? It was just such an amazing performance by Mary Tyler Moore. I love a great family drama. There’s nothing like it, and Judd Hirsch as the therapist. It was just so beautifully written and sad. I love going to movies and crying and feeling moved and like you’ve changed. It’s one of my favorite things. That’s why I wanted to become an actress. I love dark. I don’t mind sobbing in a theater; I love that stuff. You can grieve parts of yourself and parts of your life through characters in movies. That’s the magic of moviemaking and cinema, seeing yourself in the characters. I loved making Other People too because I felt like people all have different experiences about life and grief, grief and death and family, all these beautiful themes."

"Le samouraï is a film I return to again and again. Like with any minimalist cinema, the less it states, the more you want to discover. Jean Pierre Melville’s film has been hugely influential, from Walter Hill’s The Driver through Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional right up to this year’s Drive. Hell, even scenes from my own Hot Fuzz are ripped out of this. The iconic image of hit man Alain Delon lying on a bed in his bare apartment with just a canary for company is still echoed today. Melville took lone warrior mythology from Japanese culture, married it with the tough guy angles of ’40s gangster movies, and, along with John Boorman and Point Blank, ushered in a new age of neo noir. It’s a beguiling picture and one to stare at for a long time. Plus, it has so little dialogue that it is literally a must-watch."