"Magical realism is very important to me, and here you have some wonderful fantasy sequences—including Roy Scheider talking to Death, played by Jessica Lange. And there’s so much humor in this movie. It’s very serious on one level, because the protagonist is reflecting on his own mortality and the constant presence of death in his life, but it’s also very funny. Even when the hero is having a heart attack, the movie can’t help but break into a bit of musical theater! And as someone who used to dance before becoming a filmmaker, I’m in love with the choreography—how Scheider watches it all happening and participates in it, and how sexy it is. The dancing is very of the period—it’s maybe even a little dated—but the movie itself is not. It completely holds up."

"So here’s where, for me, it comes down to either the second Godfather, Taxi Driver, which is [Martin] Scorsese’s best film, I think, or one of two or three Altmans, I guess. And of those three, I’d probably go with Taxi Driver. It’s pretty great, and it’s one of the most dangerous films ever to come out of this country, I think. And it’s got great performances, and it’s got such electric ambiguity in what it’s saying about this guy. For me, that film marks, probably, the end point of that great period of the 1970s. So many fine directors; Altman, Coppola, the freedom of expression. I almost didn’t have the resources to deal with Taxi Driver when I first saw it . I don’t go back to it all the time, because it’s such a handful, but I think that’s Scorsese’s best film."

"When stories become iconic, you sometimes forget what made them so special in the first place. They can become the punch line to a joke. But A Tale of Two Cities not only has the best first line ever written—’It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’—it’s got everything! The novel has wine, guillotines, revolution! It has the storming of the Bastille! It has Madame Defarge, one of the best villains in any literary novel. At the end, it’s got a little romantic switcheroo: One man stands in the place of another and dies for the woman he loves. The first line is fitting right now. It’s a very have and have-not time. It’s certainly the most hopeful period for our country but also a very bleak one for a lot of people"

"I’ve got to say that this band were a massive influence on late-period Oasis. It was the one album I bought from a review because it said it was a bit like The Beatles, a bit like The Stones, a bit like The Who, really 60s-influenced and all the rest. I put it on the car stereo when I was driving to an Oasis gig and right from the start it was like, 'Wow.' It just blew me away, the lyrics, the playing. And then when we got to see them live and the singer was this giant fat dude. We ended up going on tour with them for two years. I watched them every single night and I thought they were incredible and they became really, really good friends and I still think that this album is a modern masterpiece."