"This is a really obscure one, but there’s a really weird French-Canadian movie called Leolo. Roger Ebert loved it. He gave it a four-star review when it came out. The filmmaker, Jean-Claude Lauzon… He made two movies and then he died. It’s a really tragic story. It’s this surreal, messed-up story about a kid whose family is going insane, and so he comes up with these fantastical stories to escape from his world. I saw that movie when I was in high school, and it just made such an impression on me because of the way it balanced humor and absurdity, and surrealism, and then just tragedy. It’s great. I should probably see it again. I haven’t seen it in a couple of years, so I want to make sure it still stands up. That movie is another very particularly strange coming-of-age movie that will always be a reference for me."

"Also, I would say probably Taxi Driver, just as a piece of acting and just fabulous scene-setting brilliance from Scorsese and characterization from De Niro. That’s one of those films I just watch in awe of all of it, because it’s just so uncompromising. I saw Avengers yesterday, and it was such a fun romp and really entertaining and decently done. That’s the kind of film adults watch today, when in the 1970s, when Taxi Driver came out, that was the kind of film that adults would watch. That and French Connection and Godfather and Bonnie and Clyde. Anything pre-Star Wars, really. The preserve of grown-up cinema in those days were genuinely grown-up movies, and that goes for everything I’m doing as well, from Star Trek to Ready Player One or even Mission: Impossible. They’re pure entertainment rather than think pieces, which is what film cinema used to be in the mainstream."

"This is the definitive portrait of conflicted youth struggling toward self-identity. The final tracking shot of Antoine Doinel—running down the beach to the water’s edge, stopping, with no further escape route in front of him, then turning toward camera and freeze-framed with an optical zoom into his young and lost face—always brings me to tears. It is one of the most moving and deeply earned endings to a film ever made. It was Truffaut at the brink of his career, not yet the “Truffaut” to come, still the haughty Cahiers critic who thought that just maybe he could do it better than the films of the French “Tradition of Quality.” And he and his fellow Cahiers writers did do it better. Truffaut and Malle were the two humanist poles of the New Wave, with Truffaut most closely mirroring the mix of emotions that resided in the work of his mentor, Jean Renoir, whose own film"

"Then the films that made me want to become an actor were films that were recommended by my father when I was 16, and I got my first VHS player, and they were very often these French films, Italian films in the ’60s and ’70s, and one of the films that impressed me the most was Rocco and His Brothers. Neo-realism — Rocco and His Brothers with Alain Delon, which is great because it’s told in different chapters. I think five chapters. Telling the story of each of these brothers, of this poor southern Italian family coming to Milan trying to begin a new life, and the authenticity of that neo-realistic Italian filmmaking, is very impressive. Also the drama, the way it is told, and big family issues of rivalry and jealousy and love and hatred are told in a magnificent and very moving way, and with a wonderful young Alain Delon playing Rocco."