"Like The 400 Blows it’s incredibly personal, but as opposed to naturalism it’s much more expressionist; the whole mix of reality, memory, and real fantasy — the character’s fantasy versus the movie fantasy that’s unfolding through the real-time story. The character being a director making a movie, and how it all gets jumbled together and mixed together … to me it creates this amazing concept, that a person’s identity isn’t just one fixed thing. It’s actually — and this is very Fellini-esque — like a carousel of several things that are just always changing and swapping around. You don’t only have one identity, you have several of them, and they’re always changing and you’re always trying to satisfy all of them. Hence, we’re never happy and we never get it right, and it’s all very confusing. But you know, for Fellini, 8 ½ is incredibly optimistic in its own humanistic viewpoint on the beauty of that, as opposed to being smothered and depressed by the realization that this character will never be satisfied and is always disappointing other people. There’s an embrace of the life around him that I find really beautiful. I guess people can say it’s sentimental, but I think he earns it by the end of the movie because it explores so many truthful, and often dark, corners of the human soul."

"I loved Pan’s Labyrinth. It transported me into another world. I like fantasy worlds; I love Lord of the Rings as well, for that reason, because you really get to get out of reality and go somewhere else. Pan’s Labyrinth was kind of this dark, sick, beautiful… it was like watching a moving painting, like a Salvador Dali painting or something like that. It was just really magical and it sort of provoked so many different feelings at one time. It’s kind of sick, you know, the guy with no eyes is coming at her and it felt like when you have a crazy dream — you’re watching someone’s crazy dream. It just affected me."