"An African American filmmaker [Robert Townsend] and being Keenen’s little brother inspired me to want to do movies. It really told the whole truth about African-Americans in the struggle, in a funny way, without all of us banging on the door going, “Hey Hollywood, love us.” Through laughter, it erased color lines, and is one of my all time favorites. I love when you do a movie with people doing multiple characters. That’s something I do and love to do, and I find that it’s one of the hardest things to do and still be grounded as a regular person in a movie. I’m inspired to do movies like that in my next phase."

"It’s known as the lost Scorsese movie. It’s a documentary he made about his friend Steven Prince, who worked in the music business in the ’70s – the height of their drug use. Marty, who was already a hot filmmaker then, is in it and talks 200 miles a second. The main character is fascinating, and so honest, snatched out of the Hollywood and music business and drug culture of that time. Steven Prince tells the story that Quentin Tarantino used for the needle in the chest in Pulp Fiction (1994); it had happened to him, he had put a magic marker on a girl’s chest and plunged an adrenaline needle into her heart."

"Well I guess my first one has to be Withnail and I, the 1987 Bruce Robinson classic. You know, the plot is one that would get you laughed out of any Hollywood studio: Two unemployed actors go on a holiday, drinking, to one of their uncle’s cottages for the weekend; but it’s one of the most deeply rich, brilliant, tragicomic tales of male friendship. I actually remember seeing it when I was a kid, and walking out of the theater in London — and by the way, it did not do well at the time it was released; it was a tiny little film — but I remember thinking that I wanted to become a filmmaker after that."

"I just saw Hidden Figures yesterday and I’m so glad that I saw it at the New Year, because I feel like that’s exactly what you want to get off on the right foot for 2017. I saw it with my husband and my kids. My kids are 11 and eight, and it was a phenomenal experience. I saw it at the ArcLight in Hollywood and the house was full. Everybody was so vocal. We clapped, we laughed, we cried. It was like watching a play. I really don’t know how to describe it. Afterwards we went out to eat and I could not shut up about it. I could not stop talking about it."

"This was the movie, when I was a kid. This and Bugsy Malone. I know all of the dialogue in these two movies from repeated viewings at the movie theater. The Vogue and the Alpha 3 theaters in Louisville. And Ruth Gordon gave me a gateway to Hollywood screenwriting history, and Cat Stevens a gateway to transformation through music. Harold took life’s lemons and made a black psychedelic monolithic lemonade. I learned to do that too. Comedy in death, comedy in failure, comedy in being mystified by societal expectations. I was very fond of MGM musicals during my childhood, and Harold and Maude felt like the closest thing to a modern-day evolution of one of those."

"Possibly my favorite of the many Cassavetes films I love. Why? Maybe because he found a way to depict the ruthlessness of the Hollywood system, and because of how Cosmo (Ben Gazzara) keeps smiling as he searches for a civil way out of his predicament. It’s very roughly made, which I find touching and refreshing, now that we all seem to fetishize high production values above all else. The cabaret scenes are authentically seedy, even a little pathetic, and are set in an LA that no longer exists. But there’s real tenderness between Cosmo and his black girlfriend and her mother. The story seems to meander in an alive, curious way, even as it drives to its terrible conclusion."

"In a year filled with epochal films—Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, the great In a Lonely Place—this 1950 noir may have secretly had the greatest impact. Every heist film or let’s-get-a-team-together caper of the last seventy years owes a huge debt to Huston’s twisting and intense thriller, whose delightful ensemble cast features a bright-eyed Marilyn Monroe (then just about to take over Hollywood) and a grizzled Sterling Hayden (who was already looking to leave the industry altogether). The final moment is a genuine heartbreaker—as is the documentary about Hayden on the Criterion edition, which finds the great actor living on a boat, seemingly set adrift from society."