"I’d probably have to throw in the Sergei Bondarchuk War and Peace from the ’60s. I remember seeing that with my step-dad when I was about 15. The scale of it and the kind of dramatic style of old, expressionistic use of the camera, that led me then to look at things like Ivan the Terrible. I just thought they were amazing. No one’s quite touched it since. When you look at it, the only thing that’s dated is probably the font they used for the titles — it sort of says it’s a bit ’60s, but the rest of it you just go, “Wow, this guy played Pierre as well as directing it.” And there’s not one CGI soldier, you know: they’ve literally got 50,000 troops in the back of shot."

"This is generally known as Bergman’s most personal film, a complete masterpiece and triumphant study of childhood and the human condition, but I came to it by accident. This is a bit embarrassing, but I was about fifteen and I thought it was the movie adaptation of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. To a highly untrained teenager’s eye, there are just enough similarities—like messed-up bourgeois family dynamics as seen through the prism of siblings—that I must have thought, “Well, I guess the whole thing just takes place over Christmas now. And they changed the names. And everyone’s Swedish.” Best cinematic mix-up of my life. Even better than that time in college when I drunkenly watched the second disc of Magnolia first and thought it made total sense."