"Paul Thomas Anderson. Magnolia. I just really love it. I mean, yeah, There Will be Blood is also a close contender; I love that too. But Magnolia — the audacity of it. I watched that movie and it’s scary by the end of it [laughing]. You’ve gone through this sort of tapestry of humanity that I feel is very hard to match in a lot of cinema these days. He is always surprising me, but that movie just… He finds a way to get the drama — he has a moment where everyone starts breaking out in unified song. And it feels totally authentic and earned. I’ve never seen a movie that does that but didn’t feel indulgent."

"[Laughs.] Yeah, I mean, all these things obviously exist to some extent, but this was just, “Here are people.” And these are four main kids who are sort of just making their first forays into romance and what it means to be young men and young women. It doesn’t talk down to them, it doesn’t assume things. It all sort of flows from within these young people and from the actors themselves, and it has a humanity that I don’t think has been achieved before or after in depictions of people that age. So I always thrust it on our students, especially young Latino students who don’t see a whole lot of depictions of themselves in American movies."

"Mizoguchi is a filmmaker I discovered pretty early. When I was younger, I watched anything Scorsese recommended, and I saw an interview with him where he referenced Ugetsu. I just fell in love with Mizoguchi’s work. He called the Academy ratio the “painterly ratio,” and I feel like there are very few filmmakers who did as much with that frame. Sansho the Bailiff is just one of the most devastating melodramas I’ve ever seen, and Ugetsu is a beautiful, ethereal ghost story. His films are quiet while also being extremely harsh and brutal. There’s a clinical, distant quality to his films, but there’s also this aching humanity at the heart of everything he did."

"Mizoguchi is a filmmaker I discovered pretty early. When I was younger, I watched anything Scorsese recommended, and I saw an interview with him where he referenced Ugetsu. I just fell in love with Mizoguchi’s work. He called the Academy ratio the “painterly ratio,” and I feel like there are very few filmmakers who did as much with that frame. Sansho the Bailiff is just one of the most devastating melodramas I’ve ever seen, and Ugetsu is a beautiful, ethereal ghost story. His films are quiet while also being extremely harsh and brutal. There’s a clinical, distant quality to his films, but there’s also this aching humanity at the heart of everything he did."