"I do remember talking with [filmmaker David] Fincher. He was telling me about the original one that [Michael Haneke] did, Funny Games, and I was telling him about Hidden. And we didn’t realize in that conversation that we were talking about the same filmmaker. But it is truly, for me, the God of cinema, that just does not breathe a step wrong, and is contemporary life apart from Kieslowski’s time — is Haneke. I looked at that film and I thought it the most thrillingly, chillingly, correctly timed movie that I have ever seen."

"It’s a very, very intense movie. Isabelle Huppert, I think, is the greatest living actress. She goes on such a crazy journey in this movie. It’s an incredible performance, and it’s just an impeccably made movie. It’s a perfect movie. You haven’t seen it? Oh, you need to watch it. It’s so intense and so disturbing. Nobody does that kind of glowing sense of dread like Michael Haneke, where you just feel it coming and you’re like, “Oh god, oh my god, what’s going to happen?” I think he’s such a master. I was at a party one time with a friend of mine and I said, “Oh my God, it’s Michael Haneke!” And she was like, “How do you know?” I was really starstruck to see him — like, “How do you know what he looks like?”"

"Number four would be a movie called The Piano Teacher by Michael Haneke. That’s a really interesting character study to me, and that is my other favorite on-screen performance, Isabelle Huppert. I just think it’s a really, really interesting character study; again, disturbing. I guess there’s a theme here. [laughs] And her last frame of acting in that movie — not actually the last frame; the last frame is her walking, but the one before that is the best piece of acting I’ve ever seen in my entire life. If you don’t know what I’m talking about you have to go watch it."

"This is hard, because it could be many things. I mean, it could be Kubrick, it could be Haneke again. Do I need to mix it up a little bit? I feel like I’ve gone very serious. I think it’s either 2001: A Space Odyssey or Funny Games by Michael Haneke. What I like about Funny Games is a moment, actually, where all of it… OK, I think 2001 is a better movie. However, there’s a moment in Funny Games that’s genius, that I love, which is when he turns to the audience, and suddenly turns the whole movie into this kind of study, where we are accountable as an audience. Because we like the violence that’s happening in the movie, and he’s doing it for us, so suddenly we’re culpable. And I think that’s a really cool moment in film that I haven’t really seen other than that. Yeah, I thought that was really clever. Also, I’m talking the American remake, not the original, because he remade it shot-for-shot for the American audience, which is really interesting, because he made it in German and then it only had so much reach, and then was like, “I want to make this for a society where violence maybe is a little more glamorized.” And I’m not just saying that about Americans; I think we’re the same in the UK, where we really like watching that on-screen. It’s just a really interesting study into that, and so, for that reason, I’m going with that. And one time I hosted a screening where all of our friends came down and watched it, and I have never seen a more depressed group of people in my life, and it was a huge mistake. [laughs] Everyone left immediately. No one hung around after."