"First of all, I would say John Sayles’s Matewan. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it — and by the way, you should, because it’s a really incredible film — but it was one of those things where my Aunt Mary Jean from Knoxville, Tennessee sat me down and said, “You need to see this movie.” It’s by the same guy who did this other movie called Brother from Another Planet, but this movie’s really one of the best strike movies. It had James Earl Jones, Chris Cooper in his first movie, and Mary McDonnell. It’s got an incredible cast, but it’s just got a lot of soul. It’s really one of my favorite movies."

"Horror is my favorite genre, and Ari Aster’s debut is one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. I caught it at an advance screening in Vancouver, and had to sleep with the hotel lights on afterwards – something I haven’t had to do since 2002. I was traumatized. I wondered if the movie might be too brutal. The only way to find out, of course, was to drag as many friends as I could to see it when it opened a few weeks later. Maybe it was thanks to my loudly screaming chums, but this time around I couldn’t stop laughing. What a wicked movie. I can’t wait to rewatch it every October for the rest of my life."

"This is one that will never be in the list of really great movies, but there’s so many really good comedy performances in it, and it’s a comedy museum by itself of performers of this certain era and how great they were. It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World. My favorite thing about It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, which was, in its original release, pretty f***ing long, is that at least one of the versions that came out on home video, they released it with 20 extra minutes. So that would be It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World. You have to add an extra “Mad” to it."

"When I was a kid I saw My Name Is Joe in the theater. I’d never seen anybody act like Peter Mullan before and I’d never seen a movie like that, period. Watching Mullan in that movie I was just like, how do you do that? How do you get actors to do that? After that I watched every Ken Loach movie I could. Kes is one of my favorite movies ever. The plot of We the Animals is very smiliar to Kes; we follow the same formula. In fact, the entire last third of our movie is completely ripped off from the end of Kes and follows almost beat by beat the storytelling of that film."

"I’ve seen this movie more times than I can count. I think it’s the best movie about being a kid ever made. It’s a fairy tale and a nightmare and a totally believable portrayal of a Swedish family in Uppsala at the turn of the twentieth century, all at the same time. It has always reminded me of one of my favorite novels, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. It’s also a movie about the weird magic of theater . . . Both the opening sequence and the reading from Strindberg at the end kill me. And the way Bergman shoots inanimate objects . . . The statues and the toy angels and the clocks and the puppets and the lamps . . . They’re all watching Alexander, the whole movie."

"Chekhov is one of my gods and this, his first play, is my favorite. It’s a well-observed ensemble of the famous, the not-so-famous and their hangers-on at a country house they retreat to when the theatre is too much with them. But even there they are very good at playing games with one another. The genius of Chekhov is to transcend the small events that define us and reveal the universal truth behind the most ordinary situation. To me, he is the first modern writer. He writes on a human scale and by doing so with such detail, he rises to Olympian heights as surely as Oedipus or Hamlet."

"I love Stanley Kubrick so much that the mere mention of his name is enough to make me smile involuntarily. This is not my favorite Kubrick film, but it’s terrific. Peter Sellers. The war room. The Coke machine. The way each plot element triggers the next like falling dominoes. It’s a perfect machine. There are so many funny and absurd lines: “Now look, Col. Bat Guano, if that really is your name” and “Of course it’s a friendly call. Listen, if it wasn’t friendly, you probably wouldn’t have even got it.” As always, I love Kubrick’s bureaucratic, non-psychological language. His persistent return to flat, transactional dialogue provides the perfect banal foil to his wilder, more imaginative moments."