"Braveheart was another one that sort of encapsulates a lot of themes, and it’s very cinematic, it’s beautiful. I love the simplicity of that world, I’m a cowboy at heart. And I just love the idea of sort of, like, meat and hands and dirt and filth. I think the action was tremendous and violent and brutal. I thought the love story was delicate and romantic and beautiful and deeply felt. I love the sort of underdog themes: every man in his circumstance, these are things that sort of run deep in my body. The performances were great. I feel like if I was born in another era, it would be in that time or it’s a time I would like to be in. Really, really fantastic."

"This is the first movie that moved me to tears. I saw this in the theater with my mother when I was eight years old. I was a pretty lonely kid, who made friends slowly when I made them at all. So when I saw this masterwork in a darkened room, surrounded by strangers, spellbound by the flickering world onscreen that painted a devastating portrait of childhood loneliness, it felt like someone had ripped out my insides. I was sobbing in my mom’s arms, aware on some level that what I was watching was completely fake, but on another level was more real than anything I had ever felt or understood. It was the first time I became consciously aware of the power of film to make us feel something. Something I wasn’t even aware of was roiling around inside me. E.T. introduced me to the profound and melancholic truth that love and pain go hand in hand, that love both gives us strength and makes us vulnerable. But, above all, it made me understand that love heals us and gives our lives meaning. E.T. introduced me to an idea that, over thirty years later, would beat at the heart of my directing debut. An eight-year-old me wasn’t prepared for any of that. But watching this movie, clutching my mother’s arm, an overwhelming feeling of empathy washed over me, and it reminded me that I wasn’t alone after all. Someone out there felt just like I did. “Ouch” indeed."