"I first saw two of my favorite personal documentaries in 1985 and 1986. Both greatly influenced me as a filmmaker. Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March offered up a neurotic self-portrait of the filmmaker’s pursuit of Southern women, while in God’s Country, Louis Malle visits with struggling farmers in Glencoe, Minnesota, a town an hour away from the Twin Cities, where I was born and raised. Sherman’s March has enjoyed far greater acclaim and exposure, but God’s Country is ultimately the more sophisticated film. These are both portraits of human pathos. But where McElwee depicts seemingly wacky Southern women with a palpable sense of disrespect for his subjects, Malle interacts with equally extreme characters in the North and manages to express a profound sense of respect and admiration, enabling us to feel sympathy for them and, ultimately, for ourselves. No disrespect to McElwee though: one of my favorite reviews of my film The Royal Road (by Bérénice Reynaud in Senses of Cinema) calls it “a sort of butch reply” to Sherman’s March."

"I really was trying to avoid Citizen Kane, but I would say Kane and the first fourth, the first half of The Magnificent Ambersons, for, you know, reasons that are obvious. I mean, it’s all miserably compromised after the first half — actually after the first third, I think — but I think the first twenty, twenty-five minutes of Ambersons is in many ways richer than anything in Kane, and that really is saying something. It struck a tone in American moviemaking; it was just absolutely new to me as a kid when I first saw that. I had never seen that kind of lightly ironic, very bittersweet, but achingly nostalgic… It’s just great, it’s just great. It’s also got probably one of my single favorite shots in cinema, that silhouette combined with the two couples after the ball. It’s the most incredible moment, and you just can’t believe you’re seeing it, and it lasts only as long as it could humanly last, and then it’s over. It’s great."

"Ranks with the best of Hitchcock, who wanted to make it but Clouzot beat him to the rights. It was made in the same year as Night and Fog and The Night of the Hunter, 1955—what a year, what a decade for world cinema. The penultimate scene had the same effect on me as Psycho. Though it no longer holds surprises for me, I watch it for its mastery of suspense and the performances of Paul Meurisse, Simone Signoret, and
 Véra Clouzot. But I confess that the nine-minute scene without words where 
Véra hears noises from her bedroom, goes down the hall to check them out, and is literally scared to death still nails me. You can bet I thought 
about how it was shot and paced when I sent Ellen Burstyn up to that attic in The Exorcist. No nudity, no sexuality, no violence, just pure, slow-building suspense that escalates to terror. The original novel was written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who also wrote Vertigo."

"It's just fucking mental! I saw it in the cinema at the time and I remember getting up to leave and then the hand coming out of the grave! So great. It goes back to what I was saying about a lot of teen films being about the different kid, who stands apart from their peers. That always resonated with me. I wasn't unpopular as a teenager, I was fine. I wasn't bullied or anything, but I did stand apart from my school mates, because I didn't want to go along with the peer culture in every single sense. I didn't like people telling me what to do, I was too independent. So films about outsiders are always tops in my book. And of course poor old Carrie is a text book example of evangelistic religiosity turning sour. It's the most amazing revenge film ever. I interviewed Kurt Cobain and he said 'I'm the guy that would be most likely to kill everyone at a high school dance' and I said, 'you mean like Carrie?' He really liked that."

"Spike Lee’s finest movie. One of the movies that made me want to get into the movies as well. I knew I was never going to make Do the Right Thing, to do what he did with cinema and tell a story comedically but also dramatically. Very intense. That movie goes from a fun comedy — I don’t know if you can say fun comedy, but it’s a funny comedy — to a dramatic shift in tone. It’s a slow burn. You don’t notice it when it happens. It comes out of left field but it’s keeping in what has come before. You realize how masterfully it’s put together. That movie informed Clerks to a large degree: it takes place all in one day, in one particular block, in one very specific city. So that was the model I used for Clerks. So much so that the original version of Clerks Dante gets killed because I was like, “I want to do something like that.” Then I realized I’m not Spike Lee."

"Being swept up in British pop culture and its swinging sixties scene is something that I am not close to alone in and yet may be hard-pressed to explain. Well, the British are so beautiful, and you can’t understand a word they’re saying. Screaming girls and Beatle haircuts may provide some distraction, but A Hard Day’s Night captures the mood of a traumatized postwar culture just as effectively as other, starker films of the “new” British cinema. In Billy Liar, Tom Courtenay’s Billy could be a famous Beatle in the making except that comedy writing is his calling, and the more eccentric and imaginative he allows himself to become creatively, the clearer it is how stifled he is by his family, his lack of self, and his generally dismal surroundings. The bleakness and futurelessness are so embedded in this character’s outlook and ultimate outcome that even the sway of Julie Christie’s modern vivaciousness and beautiful smile can’t compete with his inability to rise out of his own sorry lot in life. Just a little bit heartbreaking."

"I love all of Stanley Donen’s movies and I wanna put one of them in there. I’ll put Two for the Road, which I love. Audrey Hepburn, Stanley Donen’s movie. Those would be my five. Today. [Laughs] Tomorrow I’m gonna pick Claude Lelouch — And Now My Love. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that. It is amazing. It’s with an actress named Marthe Keller who made Bobby Deerfield with Al Pacino. And Now My Love is the story of two people who never meet until the end of the movie, and the protagonist is a kid who is a thief and gets sent to jail and learns how to use the camera in jail — and goes from making porno movies to making, you know, great movies, like Truffaut and Godard and Lelouch and the French new Wave. It’s really the best love story, and he’s an unsung hero of cinema, Claude Lelouch. Actually, that would be tied for Two for the Road — that way I get a sixth choice, and I’m greedy. [Laughs] Tie it. That’s a tie."