"I can’t forget the well-known facts surrounding Polanski’s flight from the U.S. in 1977, or excuse some of the things he’s said since about women, but somehow this man has made one of my favorite female-driven films. For me, its power lies in the meticulous way it unspools Rosemary’s inevitable undoing. It’s a near-perfect metaphor for the hell that is a woman’s life when she loses her rights over her own body. Rosemary fights as hard as she can to defeat the satanic forces stacked against her, and the tragic futility of that fight reflects a world that is as familiar as it is frightening."

"I sometimes hear films described as “Lynchian,” which, I take it, means that they deal with a certain space between light and darkness (or perhaps it’s just a more sophisticated way of saying that something is flat-out creepy). The Scarlet Empress is David Lynch for 1934 . . . and by that I mean that the lighting design is crucial. I love the scene where the freaky Grand Duke Peter (whom I recognized as the crotchety book salesman from my childhood favorite—the ever-so-slightly psychedelically tinged—Bedknobs and Broomsticks) emerges from the shadows to meet his new bride, the Princess Sophia Frederica (played by Marlene Dietrich) for the first time"

"I’ll start with 25th Hour, the Spike Lee movie. It was actually written by David Benioff, who writes Game of Thrones. It was my favorite movie before I met David, and when I found out that he had written it, I proceeded to — when drunk in a bar once — to give him my version of the Edward Norton monologue that happens during the movie. Really embarrassing. I cringe to this day that I did that and gave him my rendition of it. It’s just an amazing movie. I love Edward Norton, I love Philip Seymour Hoffman in it, Barry Pepper, you know. It’s a fantastic movie."