"My number one favorite film is All the President’s Men, by [Alan] Pakula. All the President’s Men is a movie that has a very personal place for me because it made me want to be a journalist, and then it made me want to be a filmmaker. I think that it has a level of realism that’s really unparalleled in the world of thrillers which, inevitably, this film actually is. There are moments of naturalism in it that are extraordinary. I remember there’s one moment in it where [Robert] Redford is speaking to someone on the other line who’s speaking Spanish. And he turns to the newsroom and says, “Does anyone here speak English?” And then he laughs at himself and says, “I mean Spanish.” It had this very real feel, and I asked Bob whether or not it was improvised. He said, “No, it was actually planned. It was in the screenplay.” And there’s that sort of attentiveness to human mannerism and the frailty of our diction is rather beautiful in a film. It’s also supremely cast. There’s nothing about it I don’t like."

"His Girl Friday is funny because it’s… In that way that I think In Bruges and JCVD are just perfect, it is perfect. It is beyond perfect. It is transcendently flawless for like the first 45 minutes, and then it kind of goes off into crazy town. But you still stay with it, and the tone completely changes and it gets really weird and dark, but I guess that’s what happens in some of those movies. But it’s the perfect distillation of that kind of fast-talking, thin-line-between-love-and-hate style relationship. It would definitely be the kind of movie that, if somebody was trying to get into movies from the ’30s and ’40s and wanted that kind of patter and that kind of style, I would definitely point them in that direction. The Women is my favorite film, but it’s kind of a lot to take in, and I would understand if it scared people off a little bit. Whereas if you watch the first 20 minutes of His Girl Friday, you’re in. It’s like a starter course for that kind of film."

"Another would be Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. I know they finally did a new complete version; they restored it back to the original as close as they could. I think Scorsese was involved with that. I haven’t seen that. I think there’s another 12 minutes added; that’s what I’ve heard. Anyway, that’s been one of my favorite movies forever.I think it’s one of the most important movies I’ve ever seen, because I was like a young teenager when I saw it the first time, and I was so… I mean, I grew up in the countryside in a small village in Denmark, as far from the Lower East Side of New York as you can possibly get, and still I remember just identifying 100 percent with Noodles, the main character. I was feeling everything. I was going through his heartbreak. And I do remember at the time feeling like, “I want to do that. Imagine if I could be in something where someone else could have the experience I just had watching this movie.” So that was a very important film for me. I’ve seen it many times, and it’s just beautiful."

"Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a filmmaker that I’ve since followed, you know, throughout his career and I think he’s one of my favorites and a kind of, you know, a very distinctive voice in France, but that film still I think is probably my favorite of his. I feel like he kind of almost returned to form a little bit with Micmacs. Micmacs really reminded me of Delicatessen in terms of its vibe. But Delicatessen is just, there’s a great amount of comedy to it, the characters are so bizarre and so well-drawn. The world is so strange, it’s not totally relatable. It’s very funny. It’s very dark. I remember when I saw that movie, I’d never seen anything like it. And I think by the time I saw Delicatessen for the first time, City of Lost Children had already come and gone. But Delicatessen was the first thing that I’d seen. And , you know, from an art direction standpoint, I think I was also so unbelievably impressed, because it was him and his partner, and I can’t remember his partner’s name who was also kind of like his art director."

"If I had to have one favorite movie that I’ve seen a hundred times, it’s probably that. I’m not really sure why I first liked it; I must have been fourteen or something like that when I first saw it. It’s always meant so much to me. Peter Riegert plays a maybe 40-year-old businessman who’s in the oil business and is called and sent up to the coast of Scotland to look into buying some land where they found some oil and he has to negotiate with the local village. [He] thinks it’s going to be a very tough thing to sort of uproot all these people, [and] the comedy is that they’re only too happy to sell out. They’re just trying to negotiate the price up as much as possible. It unfolds at its own pace, and he falls in love with this town and with the sea and cares less and less about the deal. He more and more wants to trade places with the local innkeeper and move to this town and stay there. A beautifully made film and I feel like there was a rash of movies right afterward that sort of tried to capture what he achieved. These people sort of coming to some little town and being transformed. It’s so touching and so funny and warm, and has so many moments of grief and elegance and delicacy. It’s got beautiful music by Mark Knopfler. That might have been the first movie that I felt that strongly about at that sort of formative time. But it’s very strange to feel like that’s the movie, you know? It doesn’t have some young protagonist. [But] from then on I was obsessed with Scotland and Ireland. Wanting desperately to go up there, and then when I did, it was very similar to that feeling. I went [on] a Bill Forsyth binge and watched all of his movies, like Gregory’s Two Girls, and Comfort and Joy, and Breaking In, even, with Burt Reynolds of all people. I wish he were still making movies."