"Would be in the top five. Because I’m from New Zealand, and the movie was very impactful when I saw it. It was so incredible to see a story about the beginnings of my country of New Zealand. Well, not the beginnings, because there were indigenous people there, but when the settlers came, it’s just such an interesting story to see. And also, it was all filmed around where I grew up, and I’ve never seen a movie that was filmed in the part of the world that I grew up in. And Jane Campion is one of my favorite filmmakers."

"Le plaisir is probably my favorite Ophuls movie. It’s three stories by Guy de Maupassant. The camera work in this movie (as in all of Ophuls’s movies) is astounding. The masked figure dancing in the first story is incredibly haunting. Then there are the tracking shots from window to window at the bordello in the second story. And there’s a camera move in the third story that, given the equipment of the time, has to be one of the best in film history (I can’t say what it is or it’ll ruin the story—you’ll know it when you see it)."

"Number four would be a movie called The Piano Teacher by Michael Haneke. That’s a really interesting character study to me, and that is my other favorite on-screen performance, Isabelle Huppert. I just think it’s a really, really interesting character study; again, disturbing. I guess there’s a theme here. [laughs] And her last frame of acting in that movie — not actually the last frame; the last frame is her walking, but the one before that is the best piece of acting I’ve ever seen in my entire life. If you don’t know what I’m talking about you have to go watch it."

"Terms of Endearment is always a touchstone movie for me. That’s one of the best acted comedy-dramas that has ever been made. I can never get enough of Terms of Endearment. I find myself watching it over and over again. It does everything that I want a movie to do. I fall in love with the characters. I care about their journeys. It never does anything easy to make me like the characters. It doesn’t sell out the characters for likeability. They all do things that are awful to each other. The relationships are very complicated. Yet, you root for all of them when you watch the movie. A large portion of the movie is also about cancer. It’s treated realistically and it is also hilarious in some of those moments. It’s not a maudlin movie. There are moments in that movie that I think about all the time that haunt me. The moment when Shirley MacLaine is yelling at the nurse to give her daughter more medicine… As you get older, you find yourself in those situations. It may be my favorite film of all time."