"I guess I would say, again, to choose among a lot of different ones, I love Sullivan’s Travels. I love a lot of Preston Sturges movies. It’s a movie about movies, and I just think it’s just so funny. I love it. The first five minutes of the movie are among the funniest five minutes ever. Like when he’s in the studio boss’s office; it’s the fastest dialogue. [laughs] How they managed to do that scene, it’s just flying."

"I’ll choose one of the Preston Sturges comedies. It’s hard to decide between Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels. Those are two wonderful films. I’ve seen The Lady Eve maybe six or seven times. It’s Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, right? It makes me laugh every time. It is a great comedy with some great, wonderful slapstick, and just very clever, very witty, and very sexy, too. She was very sexy in this film. These are all films that I watch more than once."

"Let’s do Preston Sturges and the greatest comedy of all. This film hasn’t aged a day from 1941 when it came out; it’s amazing — especially with Hollywood in mind. It’s the ultimate inside Hollywood movie. It’s about a guy searching for meaning in his art who’s had all this success in Hollywood… The human dynamics of it are very true to life. I mean, it’s a comedy and it’s all pitched at that point, but Preston Sturges was such the master of dialogue and delivery that the whole tone and pitch of it is totally unique. It’s amazingly contemporary. This character’s desires and the timeless subject of, say, art versus commerce is one of the best film depictions of that you could ever find — and in a very comedic way. He has a project that the studio doesn’t want him to make about homelessness — this is coming out of the Depression — and he’s a spoiled rich guy and he has a project he wants to make. Of course, the Coens made a film with that name, O Brother, Where Art Thou? That’s where that comes from. And it’s kind of a ridiculous desire to say something that has social significance and meaning about suffering and all that stuff, but he’s really kind of desperate to make a comedy. He ends up on a chain gang by a series of misadventures… So he really is suffering. It’s just a brilliant movie and surprisingly contemporary."

"When Wes Anderson asked me to provide incidental narration to his film about the Tenenbaum tribe, I honestly could not make out what the film was about. It turned out to be a Wes Anderson film, which, in my mind, is the New Yorker magazine’s cartoon staff meets Jules Feiffer meets Preston Sturges. Or, perhaps, none of that. The Royal Tenenbaums, at the time of its release, was arguably one of the most original movies, in tone and style, since Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. The cast is pitch-perfect, and the film features Gene Hackman’s greatest work. (I know. That’s saying a lot. But it’s true.) Anderson and Owen Wilson were nominated for best original screenplay at the Oscars in 2002. With cinematography by the remarkable Robert Yeoman (Drugstore Cowboy, The Squid and the Whale)."

"As narrated in his highly entertaining autobiography, over the course of his life Preston Sturges had a long string of failed schemes, inventions, films, and affairs. And it seems like he had the great fortune to find it all funny. The climax of Unfaithfully Yours, when every possible minor physical thing goes wrong in Rex Harrison’s murder plot, isn’t just perfect circus-like slapstick. It’s a downright celebration of the ways that record players, telephones, wicker chairs, and gloves are these ridiculous, weird contraptions we can barely use competently. We aren’t the masters of the physical world; it’s really a wonder we survive out there. This is the huge insight Unfaithfully Yours has over a film like Modern Times or any other techno-dystopia. Like, sure, sometimes machines crush the souls of humans into their perfectly calibrated gears. But most of the time, it’s a miracle if they fucking work."

"I would say Sullivan’s Travels would probably round out the five. That movie is kind of what I’m always wrestling with, you know — there’s the idea of, “Do I go out and entertain people [laughs], or do I go out and say something?” I love that movie. That’s just another movie that, you know, Preston Sturges movies — they’re not really set in the real world, or most of them aren’t set in any real world, but the characters are always very realistic; and then he has these great, oddball one-dimensional characters that show up. Clearly that’s something that’s kind of influenced me, ’cause I don’t think the world that my movies take place in, it’s not a real place. I always laugh at people who go, “Well, you know, they would have been caught” in [God Bless America] and I’m like, “It’s not real, man.” I don’t wanna have a scene where Harvey Keitel is in front of this big map of the United States going, “I gotta get inside their brains. I gotta figure out where they’re gonna strike next.”"

"I saw this for the first time at CalArts [and] since then I’ve become a big fan of all Preston Sturges films. Again, I [had] already chosen what I wanted to do for a living but [this] story touched me so deeply. Here’s a guy who makes comedies during the Depression and he’s so isolated in Hollywood [that] he sets out to learn what’s going on with people. He becomes a hobo. And he ends up way in the South and [is] put into this work prison. And everyone in Hollywood believes that he’s dead, that a hobo stole his coat and was killed by a train. And so he’s there and [he can’t] get word back that he’s still alive. It’s a horrible situation. For Christmas Eve, at the depth of his misery, a black church in the segregated South invites all the prisoners out. And they sit there and what they watch is a Pluto cartoon. It’s the famous scene of Pluto getting the flypaper stuck on him and he can’t get it off. And [the audience] starts howling with laughter. Howling with laughter. People who you wouldn’t think would still have laughter in their bodies. And Sullivan came out of this and gets back to Hollywood and everyone’s like, “Oh, you had this horrible situation, you must make a great drama.” And he goes, “No, I’m going to make a comedy. Because that’s what the world needs.”"