"I get so much pleasure from the interplay between Bette Davis and Anne Baxter in this film. My favorite thing is that long party sequence. I’m struck by the challenge of shooting something like that, of tracking all the people on-screen and letting the drama unfold slowly over an extended period of time. There’s something thrilling about the progression of Davis’s character into drunken sloppiness, as she watches her lover become more and more fascinated with this younger woman. Her emotional unraveling, and the way the camera follows Davis’s performance, shows what can happen when a great director gets to work with a great actor."

"One of my favorite films is Avatar. I love the connection to the land; it’s like Aboriginal culture. I love the idea that everything is connected, and if you cut down a tree in one area, it’s actually going to have a flow-on effect to other beings, and I love there was this one significant tree in the whole movie that was the key in connection to a group of people culturally. It protected them, it gave them shelter, it gave them protection from within. So that’s what I love about Avatar. I also love that they won; they fought off the human race, which was coming for greed purposes."

"For many years I had a problem with Emma, as compared to, say, Pride and Prejudice. I loved ‘P and P’, and I loved its practically perfect heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. Emma, on the other hand, has a much more problematic heroine: Emma Woodhouse is bossy, controlling, obstinate, pigheaded and manipulative. In short, she is horribly like me at my worst. Getting older has mellowed me in many ways, and now that I like to delude myself that I’m not as much like Emma Woodhouse as I used to be, I’ve grown to love the book. Still, Pride and Prejudice is probably my favorite book ever, ever, ever."

"For many years I had a problem with Emma, as compared to, say, Pride and Prejudice. I loved ‘P and P’, and I loved its practically perfect heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. Emma, on the other hand, has a much more problematic heroine: Emma Woodhouse is bossy, controlling, obstinate, pigheaded and manipulative. In short, she is horribly like me at my worst. Getting older has mellowed me in many ways, and now that I like to delude myself that I’m not as much like Emma Woodhouse as I used to be, I’ve grown to love the book. Still, Pride and Prejudice is probably my favorite book ever, ever, ever."

"Cronenberg is a good example of a director who has often made my favorite kind of film: a genre movie that feels profound. I haven’t seen The Brood in a long time, but I remember how it excited me. He wrote it too, as he will, and it’s low budget, which is a virtue, and it’s a horror movie that ingeniously presents the idea of extreme human emotion becoming personified, in a strong metaphor for how life can feel. Maybe that’s already a spoiler. I’ll stop, except to say that perhaps an even greater instance of a profound genre flick from Cronenberg is The Fly."

"Camille Paglia is one of the most controversial feminists of all time, and also one of the most compelling. This mammoth book, put very shortly, examines the representation of sexuality in Western art. But it also goes into fierce discussion about religion, literature, art history, psychology, the brutal forces of sex and nature, and the amorality and pornography present in great art. As someone who personally writes a lot about sex work, one of my favorite lines in the book is, “The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture.”"

"And my third favorite is Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And I prefer the kind of dark cut — where the family is a little bit more “damned.” Richard Dreyfuss’ family — they’re a little bit more nagging, and it’s almost like they’re stepping on his dream and vision. They sort of become representative of a kind of bourgeois middle class America that doesn’t have any imagination and perhaps is even a little bit materialistic. It’s great. And in this one, I think it’s hinted that Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillon do get together. I just love it. I love Close Encounters –– it’s magical. "

"Mother and Child by Rodrigo García, because he’s really incredible about dealing with human relationships and he’s not afraid to go as dark as you need. He’s one of my favorite directors of all time, and I think he can write for a woman almost better than he can for a man. (laughs) And he’s a straight man. His father is actually Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He’s got just a nice touch with women and the performances are outstanding. Annette Bening and Naomi Watts and Britt [Brittany] Robertson, just f***ing everybody in that movie is… oh, it’s just f***ing one of the most beautiful, flawless films I’ve ever seen."

"The first one is Annie Hall. All of these movies are movies that… I mean, I feel that most people’s favorite movies are movies that you can see over and over again. That’s just a movie that, you know, I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it and it doesn’t even matter anymore. It’s one of those movies that, every time it comes on TV, I have to sit down and watch it even if I’ve seen it before. To talk about why I love it, I mean, what do I even say? “Because I’m not a moron [laughing]? That’s why I love it?"

"Yes, I admired Marlon Brando and I know that he influenced James Dean and he really kind of changed the world of film acting with his naturalistic style, but it was because of Vivien Leigh’s performance as Blanche DuBois that I would put that as one of my favorite movies; because of her dialog, the Tennessee Williams dialog, the music, Kazan’s direction, and Vivien Leigh’s delivery of lines like — I’m paraphrasing — but when she says, “the human heart, how can that be straight?”, you know. It was such a powerfully vulnerable, tragic performance that I have to put that on the top five, because that movie held that performance."