"I’m going to go with Murmur of the Heart, the Louis Malle film. That’s one that I’ve seen in the last couple years that has become a new favorite. It’s about a little boy growing up and his love for his mother and the complication of being a child and becoming an adult and living in that liminal space. That movie really broke my heart and surprised me in just one hundred ways."

"Life of Brian is the one Monty Python movie that really works as a movie (they’re all funny). The hardest I ever saw my dad laugh is when it cuts to the Sermon on the Mount and the camera slowly zooms back to reveal a huge crowd of people listening and finally settles on Terry Jones, playing Brian’s mother, at the very back, and he shouts “Speak up!” One of the best comedies ever."

"This is a wonderful song, it really calmed my nerves when I was in therapy struggling with anxiety. I always come back to this song because it reminds me of my mother singing hymns to me as a child. I’ve always been taking by that image of a river where you go down under the water and when you come up you’re somehow new again. I don’t know I’ve experienced that, but I’d like to"

"And then finally I love… [long pause] Can I think about the last one? [Breslin’s mother intervenes: “For sentimental reasons the one you always loved was Prancer,” she suggests, laughing.] Oh yeah, I loved Prancer. Oh my god. [Laughs] I actually, really— okay, yeah, I’ll put that. So that movie, for sentimental reasons, and just because I still love it. It still has to be watched every Christmas. [Mom laughs in the background. ]"

"I first saw this film when I started seeking out movies directed by women. This one stood out. There’s something so believable about that lead character—she’s a teenager I can understand. I loved her anger and her passion, and I was touched by her relationship with her mother. And I find Michael Fassbender’s performance so creepy in the midst of all this mundaneness, which Andrea Arnold depicts in such a raw and powerful way."

"When I was preparing my film Aquarius, I looked at a number of films I admire. Two of them were from South Korea, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother and Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine. This is an intimate film for the big screen, and difficult to predict in how it unfolds. Its 142-minute running time made me feel more at ease with how long Aquarius turned out to be, also 142 minutes."