"I’m sort of torn on my last film between Badlands and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I’m on the fence — I love both of those films. Badlands, for me, is a very important film because I feel like a lot of the time it’s the kind of film I would love to make, if I could just make one. It’s so small, but really perfect. I think another great example of a film, which is like a second film, that people don’t think about, is Days of Heaven, which is again another flawless film. His use of voice over is the best out of any filmmaker. Linda Manz, her voiceover, nothing can beat it, you know. I always think that if there’s a voiceover in a film, it’s gotta be like that, where it?s not telling you what’s happening, it’s talking about completely different things. It’s incredible."

"I’m sort of torn on my last film between Badlands and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I’m on the fence — I love both of those films. Badlands, for me, is a very important film because I feel like a lot of the time it’s the kind of film I would love to make, if I could just make one. It’s so small, but really perfect. I think another great example of a film, which is like a second film, that people don’t think about, is Days of Heaven, which is again another flawless film. His use of voice over is the best out of any filmmaker. Linda Manz, her voiceover, nothing can beat it, you know. I always think that if there’s a voiceover in a film, it’s gotta be like that, where it?s not telling you what’s happening, it’s talking about completely different things. It’s incredible."

"I love Mona Lisa. Bob Hoskins and Neil Jordan. It’s such an incredible movie. It’s really, really, really good. It was very, stylistically and in the production design, it’s very ’80s, very late ’70s-’80s looking. And it’s one of those movies that has a song that was written for it, you know, like they used to like to do in the ’80s. [laughs] It’s such an incredibly well made film, and it’s so interesting, a really dark, twisted, well acted story."

"That always sticks in my mind; Timothy Hutton, Mary Tyler Moore. Isn’t it devastating? It was just such an amazing performance by Mary Tyler Moore. I love a great family drama. There’s nothing like it, and Judd Hirsch as the therapist. It was just so beautifully written and sad. I love going to movies and crying and feeling moved and like you’ve changed. It’s one of my favorite things. That’s why I wanted to become an actress. I love dark. I don’t mind sobbing in a theater; I love that stuff. You can grieve parts of yourself and parts of your life through characters in movies. That’s the magic of moviemaking and cinema, seeing yourself in the characters. I loved making Other People too because I felt like people all have different experiences about life and grief, grief and death and family, all these beautiful themes."

"For me, this was the peak. I love Dangerous as well, but Bad feels more like a coherent body of work. You can feel the superstardom of the guy; he's at the top of the game. But still there is some weirdness: a song like "Speed Demon" is really weird. It came along with a whole film, Moonwalker. You get that the guy is now trying to recreate everything—defying gravity with "Smooth Criminal," and inventing shapeshifting ways of existing with the movie."

"PlayTime is an incredible film. I just love the idea of staging scenes that look familiar but don’t function as the scenes we imagined them to be. And I like that he was fascinated with the mundane. So there’s an airport setting and there are people wearing uniforms and people that look like passengers waiting, and there are scenes occurring, but it’s just the form of a scene that you have seen in some way many times. The way he mixed sounds, where the background noise was louder than the dialogue—having that buried in the background when people spoke is just really brilliant filmmaking. I love the recontextualization. And it’s a masterpiece, with long, huge, choreographed shots of all these entrances and exits and things happening in the background and foreground. So where you’re placing your attention has been subverted so you don’t quite know what you’re looking at or what to look at. And that is incredibly impressive and very inspirational."