"The Producers is one of my favorite movies, and I don’t mean the musical. I mean the original one that Mel Brooks directed, with Zero Mostel. I saw it when it first came out. I saw it in the movie theaters, back in the ’60s. I just think as a comedy, and also being in the business as I am, and coming from theater, it just had that much more impact for me. That’s a movie I like very much."

"Robert Zemeckis’ Used Cars. One of the most underrated and under-appreciated films of all time and my favorite comedy. Kurt Russell is genius in this film and I wish he would return to comedies because his delivery and timing are to die for. Excellent supporting cast including the wonderful Jack Warden who plays two characters — dueling brothers. And kudos to Zemeckis and [co-writer] Bob Gale for writing a biting, social satirical and very un-PC script. “Jesus Palomino!”"

"This is an old movie, and though he’s not with us any more, I really love the actor Steve McQueen. This movie, Papillon, I would call it his signature movie. The reason it’s one of my favorites is simple: it’s a Steve McQueen movie. He appears in it. I don’t think I need to say any more than that. [laughs] Of course, I like Bullitt, I like them all, but if I have to pick one, Papillon is my favorite Steve McQueen movie."

"It’s my favorite of his musicals, probably because it’s the one I encountered first. I was taken by my parents, and it was such an incredible spectacle. “Chrysanthemum Tea” has typically clever Sondheim lyrics, with twisty rhymes. And the fact that it’s the shogun’s mother, and she’s poisoning her own son — there is a thread of wickedness in his work, and that was maybe my first encounter with it. I remember laughing, and being shocked at the reveal of what’s going on."

"I got on their train early and I’m just a really big fan of them. What’s cool is they’re a fan of Workaholics. They just did a cameo on Workaholics last week, which is cool to have some of my favorite rock stars to be like, ‘These guys are the shit.’ [People think this is one of their first albums] from all the commercials for the Brothers album, but you’re like, ‘Nah man, they have 10 albums.’ They’re still doing it big."

"This was the first in a series of books that feature a mouse, a vain cat, and a wombat. Everything the wombat says is nonsense (“Oh wonderful, fish—my favorite fruit.”), and it made me howl with laughter as a kid. I was brought up in East Africa, and was at school with all the international kids. We’d all been given our copies of A.A.Milne and Dr. Seuss, but people know those books. The Muddleheaded Wombat deserves a place among them."

"This seems to me one of the most delicately melancholy and yet vibrantly beautiful films I’ve ever seen. It’s heartbreaking and infuriating, convoluted and yet transparent. The color, fabrics, and décor make me wish I could relocate into a world of low, heavy light, constricting clothing, and dank, long halls even at the expense of my own happiness. I also have to bring up my other favorite Wong Kar-wai film Chungking Express. It’s just as beautiful, but slightly more lighthearted."

"I guess I’ll have to do one horror movie because it’s my thing; I love horror movies. So my favorite horror movie would be… [pauses] I guess I’ll just go with a recent one that I really like right now, which was Insidious. I actually really liked that. It was kind of like, in some ways kind of campy, but it was so fun the way it was done. I loved the storyline of it all, and the ending was really cool."

"In film school, I took a critical-studies course on Bresson. He's a filmmaker I'm certain I would never have experienced if I hadn't been forced to. And I really fell in love. This is my favorite of his films. There's a distance in his filmmaking, an artifice in his staging, that makes it feel mythic. This story felt so familiar to me, like it echoed my own teenage experience of being a girl, the terror of sex, puberty, love, industrialization, cultural apathy."