"I’m a huge fan of those Richard Linklater films, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, which are kind of like one movie, I think — I’ll call those one movie, ’cause it’s of a piece, right? I don’t know, just something about watching Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around European towns and fall in love. That movie taught me how active dialogue can be if underneath it is something dramatic. And I love Richard Linklater for that, because he loves dialogue and he lets his characters talk and I certainly want to let my characters talk. It’s not all quivering lips and, you know, weird angles. He really just puts the camera on people and lets it be dramatic."

"I’m a huge fan of those Richard Linklater films, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, which are kind of like one movie, I think — I’ll call those one movie, ’cause it’s of a piece, right? I don’t know, just something about watching Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy walk around European towns and fall in love. That movie taught me how active dialogue can be if underneath it is something dramatic. And I love Richard Linklater for that, because he loves dialogue and he lets his characters talk and I certainly want to let my characters talk. It’s not all quivering lips and, you know, weird angles. He really just puts the camera on people and lets it be dramatic."

"This really scared me coming out of it. You knew it was made for 10 cents – that was obvious – but it actually had some fabulous performances. Some of the moments – like when Leatherface kicks open the door and comes after them – I mean your blood just runs cold. It was just amazingly visceral visual storytelling. A few years earlier, I was at college and I wrote a synopsis for a novel and my teacher feedback was “this would make a great movie!” And I was crestfallen, but it made me realise I had a great visual imagination as well, and for years I fought it but eventually realised that was the thing I could do"

"The other one in the comedy genre is an all-time classic, Coming to America. Like Harlem Nights, Coming to America, the rawness of it, Eddie and Arsenio’s relationship, just all the different characters Eddie was able to play and pull off — not a shabby job, Arsenio played a lot of characters himself — but the brilliance of Eddie Murphy. If they gave Oscars for comedies back then, that would have been the top of the list. You know, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor turned in some incredible ones, too, but I tend to love what Coming to America was all about. Just the fact that it was New York, and how it started and where it went."