"This was a really important movie for me as a teenager. It was a movie I could have fun with, that I thought was a piece of art and that I thought was doing something modern that had to do with my life. Cinema until then, the ones I really appreciated were done by guys that lived in a different reality from mine and were talking about something in the past that had connections with what I was living but I would have to make an effort to be part of the story and make it work for my reality. With the Coen brothers I thought I was looking at something which was an idea from the day before, you know, and also the commitment they had to their point of view was amazing. I felt excited and it was the perfect film to fall in love with when I was young."

"I’m going to say Seven Samurai by Kurosawa. I’m going big to start with. I just, I feel like it’s close to being the perfect film. It’s thrilling. It’s adventurous. The action is incredible. The final battle, the rain-soaked battle, is just an absolutely phenomenal feat. When we did The Raid 2, we did a prison riot in the rain. We stopped the rain after about a day or two because it was costing too much money, and so we just shot the rest of it in just wet mud. That was us, modern technology, modern experiences, being able to be actually relatively quite comfortable in comparison. I cannot imagine the logistical nightmare that would have gone into them shooting that sequence in that time on film, so it’s an astounding achievement in cinema. It means something, and you feel something for each of those characters as well. I just feel like Seven Samurai is a no brainer."

"So, Raging Bull. We got a young De Niro, who put the weight on and took it off. “I got no choice!” I mean again, its something very specific to a culture and neighborhood. A young Pesci, Scorsese, all the acting in it, I just connected with it. I laughed and I got uncomfortable at the same time. I felt every emotion every time I watch that film. That’s a great night at the cinema for me when I’ve laughed, when I’ve cried, when I was angry, and when I was turned on. All of those emotions are happening when I watch that film. It’s like putting my favorite audio book on. Sometimes I can just close my eyes and listen to them talk, and there’s such a rhythm. It just feels so authentic and this is just regular conversation. It was almost like they didn’t even have a script. I think that’s a testament to the acting and the writing."

"A phenomenal slice-of-life family drama directed by the late Edward Yang from Taiwan that exemplifies some of the great realist cinema that was being made in Asian countries during this time (see Ang Lee). And despite the films having very little to do with each other, I always personally associate this film with In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai. Both films were released here in the U.S. at the same time, and I watched both on the same day. That was a crazy day. I still remember how the air tasted after stepping out of the theater that evening. Also—and I feel I have to mention this—I watched a third film that amazing weekend, After Life by Hirokazu Kore-eda, and it was my favorite of the three (and is one of my all-time favorites). Kore-eda has a nice movie called Still Walking available from Criterion, but I am hoping for a nice edition of After Life someday."

"The first one is Wild Strawberries by Ingmar Bergman. It’s what I saw when I was 15, and it showed me that films could be something more than just entertainment or going and staring at girls in the cinema or whatever, but film could have the kind of weight of a book or something like that. I used to be a big reader, and I loved going to the movies, but I had no sense of taste in the movies. You know, I grew up in a suburb of London, and I went to school in the middle of London, and that’s when I found myself, one wet afternoon, in an arthouse, and there was Wild Strawberries, and that, for me, was the beginning of it all. It had so many ideas, and it played with dreams, and I thought, “Oh my God. This is quite something.” So it really was a kind of major event in my life."

"This film was long very difficult to see; it was tangled in legal battles and became mythic as a result. I first saw the film with Les Blank present during his residency screenings at the Maysles Cinema in Harlem. Blank had an incredible ability to blend in with the surroundings and be a literal shadow on the wall or friend on a bar stool while shooting. For this film, he moved onto a boat on Leon Russell’s property and subsequently filmed for the next half-year, only to be told toward the end by Russell that he didn’t like the film and didn’t want it be released. After Blank’s untimely death, his son restored the film and thankfully put it into circulation. I think this film captures a little of what it must have been like during that time: an inexplicable, strange dream. A fascinating film from an inspiring and visionary filmmaker."

"I guess there would have to be a Scorsese movie, but there are so many to choose from. You could go for the trilogy –the Goodfellas, Casino, Wolf of Wall Street trilogy — which I absolutely love. I mean, the rise and fall, it’s a classic thing in cinema — all our lives are a rise and fall, aren’t they, if we’re lucky; it could be just a bit of a rise as we go from adulthood to old age and then we die. [Laughs] But Goodfellas and Casino, the journey of those movies to The Wolf of Wall Street, is where the morality is slowly sucked out of them. So Goodfellas is a film where they have a system, a moral code, which is eroded in Casino, where they have a slight system or morals, but it’s all slightly tarnished. But by the time you get to The Wolf of Wall Street, there’s no moral code at all."

"I guess there would have to be a Scorsese movie, but there are so many to choose from. You could go for the trilogy –the Goodfellas, Casino, Wolf of Wall Street trilogy — which I absolutely love. I mean, the rise and fall, it’s a classic thing in cinema — all our lives are a rise and fall, aren’t they, if we’re lucky; it could be just a bit of a rise as we go from adulthood to old age and then we die. [Laughs] But Goodfellas and Casino, the journey of those movies to The Wolf of Wall Street, is where the morality is slowly sucked out of them. So Goodfellas is a film where they have a system, a moral code, which is eroded in Casino, where they have a slight system or morals, but it’s all slightly tarnished. But by the time you get to The Wolf of Wall Street, there’s no moral code at all."

"The first one is The Gold Rush, by Charlie Chaplin. It’s the apogee of his genius. I saw that film when I was 11 or 12 years old in a cinema in Ramsgate, Kensington, and there were three people in there with me. Nothing has ever made me laugh as much as that. I remember, literally — in those days they used to have a velvet kind of cover over the balcony — and I remember hanging over and laughing at the sheer f–king brilliance of the comedy in that film. The one I saw was just black-and-white, too; this was before Chaplin put a voice-over on it, which I don’t enjoy — I don’t think it serves the film well. There are certain things in there, you know — around cooking and survival and stuff — that kind of are in my soul now, as someone who tries to tell stories too."