"He identified in a way that was so joyously American; an innocence and a humanism. Just a beautiful heart, that he had, and was able to put into his work. Adding screwball comedy elements to it, but at the center of which were these important thoughts about how lucky we are to be alive. He was able to do that in ways that are cinematic and entertaining as well. And eliciting these performances — like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939, 96%) and Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe (1941, 92%), Cary Grant and everybody else involved in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, 90%)…"

"I would like to go on record as saying that creating a top ten list is a living nightmare and I don’t know how anyone does it. That being said, let’s come out of the gate, straddling a bomb, with Dr. Strangelove. It’s perhaps an overstatement to say this movie shaped my entire conception of comedy, but it’s not that much of an understatement either. So: a statement. To me, this is the best Kubrick film. I think of the line “Don’t say that you’re more sorry than I am, because I’m capable of being just as sorry as you are” all the time."

"I guess you could pick any one album of their mid- to late-period, especially Revolver or Rubber Soul. This was very much discovered as a teenager, their story, their music, the feeling of a slight sense of ownership. I don’t like that, in a way, because I hate it when people feel that they kind of own our songs as a band! But anyway, anyone’s who’s grown up with The Beatles feels that sense of, “They’re mine!”. But Sgt. Pepper's… is just mind-bending as to how ambitious it is and also what their energy must have been like and the scene they were occupying. I wish that existed now; unfortunately it just doesn’t. There was a kind of innocence to that time that doesn’t exist now, it was a time when great pop music... you... you still had to try. I think one of my big problems with music today, with a lot of the pop music that’s out there, don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of great music, but most of what the general population listen to or are exposed to is really kind of mindless or soulless and music can do so much more for you as a human being."

"You know, I really get into… I can just throw it out there, because it was a great… it really was really good, but Shut Up, Little Man. It’s a documentary. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s about these two guys that move into an apartment in San Francisco. And their next-door neighbors are the worst neighbors you can possibly imagine. It’s these two older gay gentlemen that have the worst relationship that anyone could ever have. And they spend all hours of the day just screaming at each other. And so these two guys started recording these arguments. I remember in the 1990s, back before the Internet, if you wanted these odd, like, socially passed-around… Remember like Faces of Death? You could get a VHS copy of it? And so this was… You could go to certain independent record stores and they’d have a small collection of these bootlegged cassette tapes of their arguments. And I remember when we were doing Empire Records was the first time I heard these. And it’s the story of the guys that recorded… They track down the two guys that recorded all these things that were passed around through our generation. It’s a pretty amazing documentary. It’s pretty good."