"I’d read Scorsese, Tarantino, and Jarmusch raving about Jean-Pierre Melville for years. Then I read how Paul Thomas Anderson’s brilliant first movie, Hard Eight, was an homage to Melville’s Bob le flambeur. I had to see one of his movies but couldn’t track them down at my local Tulsa video store. My first night in L.A., I walked down to the newly opened Cinephile video store and rented all of them! Le doulos is my favorite. It’s one tough-guy movie. Great ending!"

"This is such a simple and funny movie that tells what is at its core a very sad story about a young woman trapped in Communist Czechoslovakia. The actors and faces that Milos Forman cast in all the roles are fantastic and real, and the young piano player’s tired and fed-up parents are two of the funniest, most subtle characters I’ve ever seen in a movie. This is one of my favorite movies to turn people on to, since very few people have ever seen it."

"I’m going to go with one of my favorite comedies of all time, I’m gonna go with Tommy Boy. Yeah, the two of them, [Chris] Farley and [David] Spade together, are just so hilarious. I’ve seen that movie so many times. I’ve become friends with Mr. Spade and it’s just so surreal because I’ve been watching him since I was a kid. I just think he’s so talented. And so is Chris Farley. If I want to get in a good mood, I watch that movie."

"I can say that, in thinking about it, I was thinking five favorite-ish movies that seemed to be relatively inspiring to me as a filmmaker or something like that. One is a movie called Bad Taste by Peter Jackson. The reason that movie is one of my favorite films is because… two things. One, I saw it when I was very young because it had a very sort of provocative box cover of an alien giving you the middle finger, in the video store; that was very charming to me. It seemed like something that needed to be rented for a sleep over. It’s one of the grossest movies ever, so it was always the benchmark of, like, “Is there a more disgusting movie than this?” And also not a lot of people had seen it so it was like a badge of honor. But more importantly, when I decided that maybe movies was something I wanted to do, that movie was actually the first movie that I think made me think I could maybe do this. Because it was the first time I’d ever seen a movie where I realized how the movie was made. And I realized, “He’s just putting a camera on the back of the car;” “Oh, that’s just him with his friend doing this;” and, “I can see how he built that effect” or “I can see how he used ketchup for blood” or whatever. It was so rough around the edges, yet still compelling and well-made that it kind of gave me this sort of inspiration and confidence to be like, “All I have to do is go do it, like this guy just went and did it.” So that movie is, like, the number one movie that made me think, “Maybe I can try this.”"

"One movie that’s always kind of a runner up, and I never really mention it because it’s so different than my other favorite films, is Notting Hill. It’s kind of a weird film to put in the group. But it’s such a perfect romantic-comedy and such a perfect vehicle. It’s like a fantasy, every man’s fantasy of meeting a beautiful movie star and being absorbed into her world and somehow making it work out. I love Julia Roberts, but that movie really made me fall in love with her, and Hugh Grant, he was such a likable guy in that movie. The supporting roles are so strong. And just the story of, just the world that… you know, I live on the very edges of this world, but just the world that Hollywood, that these people live in. It was just kind of a really interesting story. It wasn’t just a basic romantic-comedy; it had a lot of things going for it. But that’s definitely one of my favorite films. That’s one of those films that I watch every couple years. I just pop it in."