"My number one favorite film is All the President’s Men, by [Alan] Pakula. All the President’s Men is a movie that has a very personal place for me because it made me want to be a journalist, and then it made me want to be a filmmaker. I think that it has a level of realism that’s really unparalleled in the world of thrillers which, inevitably, this film actually is. There are moments of naturalism in it that are extraordinary. I remember there’s one moment in it where [Robert] Redford is speaking to someone on the other line who’s speaking Spanish. And he turns to the newsroom and says, “Does anyone here speak English?” And then he laughs at himself and says, “I mean Spanish.” It had this very real feel, and I asked Bob whether or not it was improvised. He said, “No, it was actually planned. It was in the screenplay.” And there’s that sort of attentiveness to human mannerism and the frailty of our diction is rather beautiful in a film. It’s also supremely cast. There’s nothing about it I don’t like."

"The Exterminating Angel is a surrealistic movie. It’s about a bunch of people from high society in Mexico who, after one night at the opera, decide to have drinks in the house of one of them, and they cannot get out. And they spend about three months there, and you don’t know why they cannot get out, but they cannot. [Laughs] It’s a very, very beautiful and interesting story — also risky, and very misunderstood at the time that the movie opened. But you know, that’s what happened sometimes; after the second World War, naturalism and realism won the battle, so it was imposed that cinema had to be realistic always. But there was a time that it was not like that; Russians were doing expressionist movies, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for example in Germany, and all these German directors, they were doing another type of approach to movies in formal terms. And in Spain, too, we had Luis Bunuel who was doing this type of surreal movies that were very interesting. Now they can be revised in sort of a different way, with time passed. But Luis Bunuel is definitely one of my favorite directors of all time."