"This trilogy was rereleased at Film Forum in the summer of 2015, right before we started shooting Menashe. I went once a week and cried in the theater by myself. A universal story of birth, death, love, and coming of age. So many moments I can never forget: the joy of the school montage, and the famous scene in which the children see a train for the first time, a symbol of the arrival of modernity."

"Alberto Sordi, the star of several early Fellini films, is both hilarious and heartbreaking in this story of a well-intentioned man who gets caught up in a horrible situation while trying to do the right thing for his family and hometown. I love Italy anyway, and so the black-and-white cinematography of Sicily alone is worth the price of admission. It’s one of those comedies that stays with you long after you’ve watched it."

"One of my all-time favorite novels is The Paris Wife. I am fascinated by Ernest Hemingway’s storytelling, so I loved reading about his own story and getting to know the heart of his incredibly strong and complicated muse, Hadley. I found myself transported back to the Jazz Age in Paris, one of the most romantic time periods, and totally mesmerized by the love, dependency and devotion that these two iconic characters had for each other. "

"I always go back to Death on the Stairs, the Libertines song. I love that tune. It’s the story it tells, it takes me to a place so far away and yet so familiar. It’s really hard though - I don’t believe in first or best or worse, I'm into liberty and verse - as Pete once sang [in a demo for The Libertines’ The Man Who Would be King]. It’s like going through your kids and picking your favourite child"

"My wife, Sofia, recently published her first book. I'm incredibly proud of her for all her hard work and dedication in writing this and don't know how she did this whilst being a great mom to our both daughters. The book is about her experiences being a young western woman living and doing business in a dictatorship, and it's a story of love and hustle in a land where nothing is what it appears to be."

"McEwan’s razor-sharp descriptions of human emotion always hit me hard, and I find this to be the most haunting and heartbreaking of his books. A father looks up in the grocery store and realizes his four-year-old missing; the search for her destroys his marriage and his life. I’m a huge fan of McEwan’s—my first feature was based on his short story “First Love, Last Rites,”—but this is the one that stays with me."

"Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore. [This movie] came out the same year as Pretty Woman, but this was a film that worked on so many levels — it wonderfully incorporated humor and the supernatural, and was a love story in which, even though the lead character dies, he just can’t leave the woman that he loves. And they put in the mystery, too. It’s such a unique package, I don’t think that it’s ever been done before."

"I love films that are great not only in themselves but in the idea of them that stays in memory. But this then can dwarf the actual film, which perhaps it has in the case of Black Orpheus—some aspects now try one’s patience slightly. A few years back a Brazilian film was touted as the realistic and gritty version of the story, by those who knew the actual milieu—another black eye for realism and grit."