"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."

"I guess the first one would be the Mike Leigh movie, Naked. The performances in the movie are so great. David Thewlis — it’s just one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen. And the movie — they improvised to find a script. They improvised for months and months, and then Mike Leigh writes a script based on the improv, and you can tell that it’s come from such a pure place, because it’s natural for all the actors, but it’s also just the — walking around London, and it’s just incredible. And also, my favorite actress of all time is Katrin Cartlidge, and she’s in that movie. She’s ridiculous in it, she’s so good."

"Yes, Cassavetes again, and by now it’s a no-brainer as to who my favorite filmmaker is. This time he takes on the gangster/noir genre but does it in his own inimitable abstract-expressionist style, where time slows down or sometimes speeds up, so we never know exactly where we are in terms of a traditional story arc or act structures. We are in dreamland . . . an opium-induced reverie. This is a portrait of an artist in the guise of a strip club owner, and Ben Gazzara’s Cosmo Vitelli is a career-topping performance. The onstage burlesque routines are worth the price of admission, as is the one and only Mr. Sophistication, played by Meade Roberts."

"I just really responded to the performance of Zbigniew Cybulski. This is the story of someone who spends their young life in the sewers of Warsaw knowing nothing but war, and then carrying that life without any real reason for living other than continuing on as an urban warrior, falling in love with a bar maid, too late in your life, and essentially discovering lust and passion and maybe the love of his life — in the same day that his life catches up to him and kills him. [Director Andrzej] Wadja is one of my favorite filmmakers. I love Canal and all of the whole trilogy, but Ashes and Diamonds is a film I still think about."

"Number three is 8 1/2. I feel like this is not particularly original of me, but this film probably has the most athletic blocking and camerawork that I had seen in any film. A lot of my favorite filmmakers have stolen from this film — you know, the filming from Fellini in general, but especially this film. I’ve already started stealing from him, but filmmakers like Scorsese and Polanski — so much of their technique is derived from really just the playfulness of this film in particular, and whenever I want to inspire myself to play with the camera and to play with blocking and to try to go a little bit further, I’ll watch 8 1/2."

"Was this a comedy, straight drama, fantasy? I don’t know. It’s so incredible. This has one of my favorite endings to a movie, just incredible. When he walked on the water my jaw dropped, I just freaked out, freaked out, that we were making fun of him the whole time, we thought he was an idiot the whole time, thought he was like this mentally handicapped person, and all he was was simple. The things that were happening, and the people that were following him, and the potential future for him, makes sense when you just turn your perspective that way. Bold, bold, bold genre-breaking filmmaking, and will always be kind of a beacon of originality for me."

"The autobiographical essays in this collection cover faith and family, booze, men, and self-love. They’re full of the small moments in Lamott’s life, the observations that make you laugh really hard and make you bawl really fast—two of my favorite activities. She talks about how the most popular prayers are ‘Help me, help me, help me’ and ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’ I’ve read all her work, and she continually surprises me and speaks to me. One of the lines from this book that I love is: ‘All you can do is show up for someone in crisis. Your there-ness…can be life giving, because often everyone else is in hiding.’ That’s just killer."

"Carey is one of my favorite writers. The first book of his I ever read was a collection of short stories called The Fat Man In History. He also wrote Oscar And Lucinda — a beautiful story — which was turned into a film that I made. In Kelly Gang, the narrative voice is so unique. We Australians all know that outlaw Ned Kelly was hung after the famous shoot-out in 1880. But what Carey does is get inside his character's mind in such an illuminating and heartrending way. And there's not a trace of sentimentality in it. I so admire that as an actor, because I realize how difficult it is to do."

"I love Thomas Hardy. I don’t think a lot of people know that he was also a great poet and a writer of short stories because he produced so many novels. One of my favorite short stories—and I’m not a big short story fan—is An Imaginative Woman. It’s tragic. People are going to think I’m morbid, loving all these sad books. I actually don’t mind a happy ending in a novel—certainly, it’s nice when it happens. But when you’ve invested so much time and your fingers have pushed through all that paper and you get to the end…well, a tragic ending kind of goes with the tragedy of finishing a book."