"I saw this film in college when I was first studying screenwriting and starting out as a comic. It has forever been imprinted in my DNA. It’s funny, it’s emotional, and it’s unafraid. I was so struck when I saw it that it found the beauty in a breakup as opposed to wallowing in it. It also traffics in an area so specific — a neurotic, Jewish comedian — but yet it feels so universal. Woody Allen does this in all of his films of that period: Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors. But this one truly makes me laugh the most and get choked up in the same moment. It also has the line that my wife repeats to me all the time, which is the mother’s line to the child Alvy when he asks what they’ll do about the universe expanding: “WHAT, IS THAT YOUR BUSINESS?!”"

"These are all based on books, right? And the most amazing source material, tonal source material. The Exorcist has, again, a collision of the time period with that style of cinema, but Friedkin’s kind of unlike the previous two. They did a bunch of ad-libby stuff, but The Exorcist was the most with regard to that contemporaneous kind of shooting. The story is about a reality-based story about the Devil, done at a time when docu-style was predominant, and it felt really natural. Friedkin spent an enormous amount of time shooting the movie and did it with reverence, and the structure is perfect. It starts in the Middle East, goes to a Georgetown bedroom, and gets smaller and smaller until you meet a side character, the second priest. The plot is this incredible kind of twisty thing, and then he ends up sacrificing himself. It’s awesome."

"Years ago, during those quaint days of DVD-by-mail rental, I made a dork pact with one of my friends that for several weeks straight we’d only watch films in the Criterion Collection. Additionally, they had to be films we didn’t know much about. The experience was a total revelation. There were so many amazing films that I discovered during those weeks that made me really rethink a lot of what I thought I knew about the history of cinema. Films like Ballad of a Soldier, Death of a Cyclist, René Clair comedies like À nous la liberté or Le million, American indie landmarks like Symbiopschycotaxiplasm and the stunning Ermanno Olmi pair from the early 60s Il posto and I fidanzati. But the one from this period that I always recommend to friends is Green for Danger, a delightful British murder mystery that I had never heard of."

"There was a really good film, and a film I really liked called Time After Time. With Mary Steenburgen, and she wound up marrying the British actor from Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell. My wife and I both really loved the film. It was a great film, and then the fact that they got married in real life. They didn’t stay married, but they had a couple kids together, and I’d like to think that at least for that period, that was real… where life imitated art. Because it’s such a beautiful movie, a love story. Two people from very divergent, different worlds, and I know them both, Mary and Malcolm, and they are two people from very divergent worlds. That’s probably why the marriage didn’t work out. Yet, there’s something about that that I thought was kind of sweet. It was a really good movie, too."