"It’s very hard for me to pick a favorite Douglas Sirk movie, but ultimately it’s this one, a sumptuous tearjerker with Sirk’s signature cultural critique. The moment when Jane Wyman, after sacrificing her own happiness for her children, receives a television set as a Christmas gift in lieu of their presence shatters me every time. No one understood melodrama like Sirk, or how to sharpen it into the dagger it’s meant to be."

"I’m going to go with Murmur of the Heart, the Louis Malle film. That’s one that I’ve seen in the last couple years that has become a new favorite. It’s about a little boy growing up and his love for his mother and the complication of being a child and becoming an adult and living in that liminal space. That movie really broke my heart and surprised me in just one hundred ways."

"Another very formative movie. It’s a film that Bergman initially made for television with the beautiful Ingrid Thulin – a lesser known Bergman actress but my favorite. It’s a very claustrophobic film. It uses scene/chapter headings and that’s where I stole the structure for Buy It Now. I had never seen a film that dealt with sexuality in such an honest way, without being overly graphic, and with a very sensual feeling."

"This is my favorite Fellini movie. It’s so fun and sweet and bold and effortlessly weird. You feel this young filmmaker surprising himself. It also captures the claustrophobic yet epic feeling of growing up in a small town and hanging out with your childhood friends all the time. And the whole carnival sequence is so great . . . especially the aftermath, when Alberto Sordi is wandering around the town square at dawn dragging an oversize clown head."

"Probably my favorite role of all time was Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight. That’s one of my favorites to this day. Just watching his performance in that is like… It never gets old to me. Sometimes I’ll just watch the movie, and I’ll fast forward, and I know exactly where his scenes are, and I’ll just fast forward to every scene and just watch them. So that’s another one."

"Several films by Martin Scorsese — I’m a huge fan of his — but at the top I would say Goodfellas, probably, as my favorite Scorsese film. That’s a movie that I always see when I feel that my imagination is kind of stuck and trapped, and I can’t think of a way forward. I watch Goodfellas and suddenly it frees me up entirely; it reminds me of what great film directing is all about."

"When I think of five favorite films, it’s hard for me to put in, like, Citizen Kane, because while that movie and many classic movies are amazing, I couldn’t lie and say, “If it’s on, I’m going to watch it,” whereas a movie like Fletch, I’ll watch. So I have to consider that one of my five favorite films. What’s interesting about that movie to me is, aside from the ridiculousness of Chevy Chase and his comedy, the plot’s pretty interesting. You’re trying to figure out what’s happening. He’s trying to write this article, he uncovers this whole scam, this fraud, and he’s being set up for this murder, and it holds its own. You can do the wacky characters for Fletch Lives, but you don’t actually have as interesting a central plot. Maybe you’ve just already seen a lot of the jokes. And he’s very good at his job. He’s actually very good at his job; he’s not just an idiot. He can say all the crazy lines and be hilarious, but he’s good at his job, and I think that’s actually what’s kind of cool. And truthfully, I think that’s one of the reasons why – they’ve been trying to reboot, remake that movie forever, but all you’re going to be doing is trying to find somebody who can be as funny as Chevy Chase. But I think what actually makes the movie stand out to me is that, if you break it down, he’s actually legitimately trying to uncover this plot and move the story along. He’s a good detective! So Fletch is the kind of movie that, if it’s on, I’m going to watch it. I’m going to watch it, and I’m going to recite every line. [laughs] I have to keep that in there."

"I’m going to go with All That Jazz for number one. It’s Bob Fosse directing a movie about himself; he changed the name to Joe Gideon from Bob Fosse. So he’s directing a movie about a musical choreographer/director who takes too many pills, sleeps with too many women, drinks too much; he’s a moviemaker who’s editing a movie while he’s doing a play and having hallucinations with musicals. It’s so unbelievable how he balances it all, and it’s Roy Scheider’s best performance, I think, ever. He’s amazing in it. It is so amazing. He’s a pretty despicable guy in the movie — I mean, he sleeps around on his girlfriend — but you love him. The doctors tell him not to take his drugs, but he does it anyway, and you still love him. You don’t blame him. And it’s sort of how Bob Fosse ended up dying, so he really forecasted his own death. I mean, he even put his girlfriend in the movie as his girlfriend — Joe Gideon’s girlfriend — and then cheated on her! Like, he had his character cheat on her. It’s so f***ing unbelievable. Just brilliant. That’s number one. That would be my, I have to say, overall all-time favorite. I’m just very impressed by that movie. It’s just really, really good. It’s got like four musical numbers in there, but they’re not like Glee. Some of them are in drug-induced hallucinations, and some of them are, he’s actually directing a musical. I’ve done plays; I’ve done one musical. But the first table read, when they’re going to put up this play, it is so like the table read on plays. I recognize so many things that they get right. Yeah, that’s my all-time favorite."