"Whenever I watch Seven Samurai I am immediately transported to sixteenth-century Japan. No analysis is possible, no appreciation of performance, direction, camera work, music. Somehow, I'm left feeling that miraculously, Kurosawa found a way to dig up a 400-year-old Japanese documentary. It’s a film completely devoid of artifice or ego. I have seen many of the actors in other films, but I always feel as if they’ve made some mistake, that their true identity lies in Seven Samurai. Like few films I have ever seen, this one somehow makes me feel ennobled. It’s visual Beethoven."

"It was awesome. I heard 'Slow and Low' way before I had ever seen them - before they had images to them; before I knew they were white guys. It didn’t matter, because they had an in depth understanding and a true genuine love for hip-hop. It was apparent. I had a friend Mark, who had a Hyundai car. His system was so good in that car, and that's all he used to play. When I found out they were white, I loved it even more, because it turned me onto different types of music, like the Led Zeppelin sample on 'Rhyming & Stealin'."

"I saw this film in its original run, with foley artists, a live orchestra, and live narration by Crispin Glover, which was a profoundly unique cinematic experience. It is not often you see modern filmmakers experimenting with older techniques and to such great effect. Seeing it again on DVD, I found it equally incredible; its story about a fictional Guy Maddin is compelling. Guy has been a real influence on my film work, and his films just seem to get better and better. As a fellow Winnipegger, I can truly say that Canadians are very lucky to have him."

"Both of these films are in the box set America Lost and Found: The BBS Story, which is a masterpiece. It’s too bad companies like BBS don’t exist anymore. These two films capture loneliness and melancholy in a way that affects me deeply, yet they also have humor and beautiful open endings. There are moments in the performances in The Last Picture Show—Cloris Leachman’s final scene with Timothy Bottoms, or Ben Johnson’s scene at the water tank, just to name a few—that are stunning. The film also has incredible mood and feeling, and sometimes that’s more important than anything."

"I saw both of these for the first time in film school, then I moved to Paris in my twenties and lived there for many years, always kind of romanticizing the Paris of the late 1950s that I saw in these two films but never quite finding it. You can still find a few little streets and alleyways in Ménilmontant where The Red Balloon was filmed, and a few years ago I found myself on the same beach in Normandy where Jean-Pierre Léaud runs in those beautiful long tracking shots that end The 400 Blows. Landscapes are just as important as story."

"I saw both of these for the first time in film school, then I moved to Paris in my twenties and lived there for many years, always kind of romanticizing the Paris of the late 1950s that I saw in these two films but never quite finding it. You can still find a few little streets and alleyways in Ménilmontant where The Red Balloon was filmed, and a few years ago I found myself on the same beach in Normandy where Jean-Pierre Léaud runs in those beautiful long tracking shots that end The 400 Blows. Landscapes are just as important as story."

"Let the Sunshine In, 2017, Claire Denis “comedy.” I have comedy in quotes. [Laughs] Starring the always fascinating Juliette Binoche as a Parisian artist who’s kind of looking for love in all the wrong places. And it’s kind of a sister film to Claire Denis’ film Friday Night from 2002. But in this one, Binoche inhabits a very complex character who is not entirely self-aware. I found myself laughing at many subtle moments – her misjudgments and misadventures. It also includes some great characters also portrayed by Alex Descas, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, and Gerard Depardieu in a great scene at the end."

"Do I get pretentious? Because this is foreign. {laughs] I love that German film from a few years ago that won the Oscar, The Lives of Others. Such a great movie. I’ve seen it a bunch, and I own it. I love, love, love that movie, and I found that it was just intensely riveting and scary and beautiful and so well crafted, so well plotted as a movie. And such a sad comment on a time in a certain country, but also a really beautiful comment on people being altered and finding their humanity again. I thought that movie was really special."