"It is one of the most effective and, in my mind, realistic gangster movies ever made in that it shows you what the allure of that criminal life is, but it also shows how petty and dangerous and stupid it is. But all the time you’re dragged along. It has this incredible compelling force that drags you along whether you want to go or not. And, I think, a beautiful and brutal use of comedy along with absolute horror and fear and moments of sort of operatic beauty, like when they open up the back of the truck with the Eric Clapton song, and the camera goes in to find one of the dead gang members. That mixed with these incredible moments of subtlety like when Ray Liotta realizes that Robert De Niro may well be setting him up. It’s just this tiny little moment. It’s great because it’s incredibly small, mixed with these incredibly big things. And they shoot Michael Imperioli in the foot. You know, come on, that’s wonderful."

"My fifth film — it’s the movie that literally got me wanting to make movies to begin with — is the David Cronenberg film Scanners. When I was a kid, I was a little weird kid, and I loved horror films, I loved gore films. When Michael Ironside made that guy’s head explode in that movie, I was like, “Whatever this is, I want to do this!” I was ten, eleven years old, and my parents would take me to see these. Like, I saw The Exorcist in movie theaters; I saw The Evil Dead in a movie theater. I went to see all this crazy, freaky s*** that you would never take a little kid to see today. But I saw Jaws in a movie theater. Like, I wanted to see all these scary movies, and my parents were like, “Absolutely. Let’s go.” And so here I was, as a teenager, learning how to make my own blood, and my own scars and wounds. I wanted to be Rick Baker or Tom Savini. When I was a kid, that’s who I looked up to. When I saw An American Werewolf in London, it was phenomenal, to see all those makeup special effects they were doing. And then when I went to high school and learned you could actually go to college to study film and learn how to make movies, I was like, “I’m in. That’s exactly what I want to do.”"