"When you see A Constant Forge, you realize that Cassavetes was living his films at all times. That’s something I definitely tried to do with my past two films—I wasn’t just going somewhere to make a film, I was really living it and making it a lifestyle. There’s sort of an inherent sloppiness that comes with that, but I love it because it feels like the result of just trying to capture what’s happening as opposed to constructing what has happened. I love Cassavetes in general, but Faces in particular has to be one of his most honest and real films, and it definitely feels like it has a maturity to it that you don’t find as much in Shadows, even though Shadowsis incredible. Rossellini always said the shot doesn’t need to be pretty, that for him the first thing is to keep the audience close to the characters and to follow the characters. And in Faces, there are a ton of out-of-focus shots, and it’s anything but pretty. It’s not a film that strikes people because of the magnitude and beauty of its images. It’s more about the relationships and the real life that you feel in it."

"Going in a little different direction, Apocalypse Now is an unbelievable piece of cinema. Just the scale of the production and the performances. I feel like, narratively, it’s one of the… There’s a subgenre of Vietnam movies, obviously, and this one just feels so epic and operatic, in no small part because it uses Wagner’s Ring Cycle as the score for one of the great battle scenes. I don’t know, I can’t say enough about it. And then, of course, seeing Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about it. That just made me love it even more, because you can see the creative depth that Coppola went to, the depth of his soul that he dug into to not just make the movie and keep it together, but to sort of fight for coherence in a chaotic production, and I love the discovery. I mean, clearly, when Brando showed up on set, it was such a disaster, because he didn’t know his lines and he was a hundred pounds overweight or something, and he basically refused to learn his lines. But then Coppola worked with what he had, and to me that is the most… He wound up with something genius and more coherent than what may have even been on the page originally. There’s a quote by Orson Welles that the absence of limitations is the enemy of art, and I feel like Apocalypse Now is a kind of great tribute to that idea, because Coppola just faced so much adversity making the movie. Not just Coppola, the cast, the crew, everybody faced so much and dealt with so much and then created this transcendent piece of cinema that captures a dark piece of world conflict history and some very intimate stories of young people sucked into it, and then, of course, a meditation on the darkness of the human soul, which is an important thing to explore artistically from time to time."

I just like Michael J. Fox. Michael was perfect for the role, he was funny, he kept the story moving and his character was engaging and sympathetic. I was young when I saw the movie, and I loved the idea of time travel. I dreamed I could be in an adventure like that and go everywhere in my time machine. The special effects at the time were very impressive to me. As a kid I felt this was a real adventure and I am an adventure nut.

"I’m a child of the ’80s and ’90s, and I just feel this film strikes a chord like no other. It’s such a wonderful portrayal of a generation of adolescents who simply felt like they had no real causes to fight for. In some respects, they were left to create problems for themselves to solve, and this film does a great job of caricaturing that “comfortable”—but honestly uncomfortable—plight of a generation. Owen Wilson’s performance as Dignan is also one of my all-time favorites."

"For me, this created a whole new layer of filmmaking. It’s an amazing movie, and a little bit like La strada in that you don’t have to be a filmmaker or enthusiast to appreciate it. It just plays out like a really good documentary and a really good fiction, and it says a lot not only about Iranian society but about the human condition. This is the richest movie Kiarostami made, in my opinion, and it’s one of the best works of Iranian cinema."