"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."

"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."

"I love how thought-provoking that film is. I love that there’s a lot of great laughs in it, but there’s a lot of pathos. Alan Alda has never been better at being a douchebag than in this. It’s just got so much humanity, and it’s a comedy but it’s not pushing the comedy, it just is. There’s so much I like about that movie, I just thought it was a great combination. Sometimes Woody gets a little jokey and slapstick and sometimes he gets a little lost up in his head a little bit; this movie had a lot going on. I felt like it explored morality and the human condition."

"As the son of an Episcopal priest, I have a semi-complex relationship with religion. I’ve remained fairly agnostic throughout most of my life, but I admire the seed of the Christian myth—that there can exist in the world a love that gives and asks nothing in return. No movie crystallizes this idea better than Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, which rips my heart out every time I watch it. The Christian ideal exists in humanity fleetingly, but by casting a donkey as his Christ surrogate, Bresson evokes the saintly disposition to which we should all aspire as effectively as (if not more so than) Roberto Rossellini does in The Flowers of St. Francis."