"Mentally, Casablanca connects with my world. It’s very romantic, about giving and testing, and trusting and loving… And there’s the romantic music. Everything is [in line with] my tastes of romance. It’s also about an unfulfilled love, which makes everything more beautiful because you can’t have it. It’s just human nature. If you have it — you see the person, you see the romance — then the story becomes practical, like reality. But because it’s unfulfilled, it’s always a fantasy because we add so much of our own beauty, and romance, and poetry, into it. Also, Casablanca is about the sacrifice of giving love. Real love, I think, is unconditional; you give your love away to love somebody. Otherwise it’s not real love, it’s possessive, it’s ownership."

"This has to be up there. There are parts of this movie that I think are perfect — like when [Andrew Lincoln] is flipping the cards for Keira Knightley. I just died. I think I was in love with Keira too; when I would see her, I could get that heartbreak he felt. For some reason, there’s so many aspects of love in that movie — it all resonates with you one way or another, and there’s such humor and different stories, young and old. There’s all kinds of relationships — it’s family and taking care of them even if you have to sacrifice your own romantic love. I always watch it and am always overwhelmed with how good it is. It’s amazing."

"This movie is the best example of the theme “if you love someone, sometimes you have to let them go.” This guy [Rick], he has fallen in love with this woman, and he can’t get over her. She comes back, and she’s married to this freedom fighter, someone that the Nazis are hunting. If he doesn’t give her these two plane tickets, he gets the girl, because the Nazis will find this guy. If he gives her the tickets, her husband is saved and he’ll never see her again. Boy, what a choice. Love often confronts us with some choices that are the toughest things of all. They include compromise and at times, sacrifice. And to me, Casablanca did that phenomenally well."

"This used to get me when I was in college. I haven’t watched [Tarkovsky’s] films for years now, but they really got my goat. I did not understand anything. I just watched it, and I used to have a visceral reaction with them. And I haven’t seen them for about 20 years, but any of his [would make the list]. I think The Mirror, or even The Sacrifice, or Nostalghia — any one of those just blew my rocks off. Somebody like Polanski, he does a film with the devil or he does a thriller and his DNA is all over it. So when I look at the Tarkovsky films I just think like I could interchange all of them and watch them, each one of them just shook my world."

"The first time I watched this film, I was 13 years old, and I had no idea what kind of ‘war film’ to expect. My first reaction was that it was too slow; but as I got home that night, the poetry of the narrative, the visuals and the music began to sink in. I ended up dragging my friends to see it, watching the film five times in theaters; and though the film received mixed reactions at the time, I found Terrence Malick’s work to be a transformative meditation on the classic Transcendental themes of the brotherhood of man, self-sacrifice, and faith. It is only a ‘war film’ insofar as the war is a metaphor for the Darwinian struggle of survival in what seems an unjust world."