"Michael Haneke's supremely elegant and characteristically clinical anti-romance features Isabelle Huppert's most controlled and uncompromising performance. I saw this film with my mom when I was 15 and we were both awe-stricken. I knew I wanted to make films like that. The book by Elfreide Jelinek is also stupendous."

"I first saw Dazed and Confused the day I got my driver’s license. It was like an instruction film on what was in store for me. I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They were in Texas. This movie was my exact high school experience if you just replace Kiss with Phish."

"We saw it in Venice for its world re-premiere, and it was nothing short of breathtaking. The cast of unknowns and the truth to the covalent bond of violence and romance make this a special film. What more could you ask for than Shakespeare presented by Roman Polanski and Playboy?"

"Hail the queen. Nobody used adjectives better, and nobody else quite showed how to make art out of writing about art quite as accessibly, or hilariously. Her ideas about the movies she saw made me understand the way the world is. I can't think of a better writer than Pauline Kael."

"#5, I’ll put Galaxy Quest. I know Galaxy Quest is not a great movie, but I love that movie, and I’ve seen it over and over and over, and I still love it just as much. I think Tim Allen portraying a Kirk-like character is so damn funny. I think that’s one of the best “fan” films ever made. And the fake Spock guy was great, yeah. That movie’s really funny. We saw it when it first came out — my family has a tradition of always going to a movie on Christmas afternoon, and we went and saw that one. It was such a great family moment, too. It brings back good memories."

"Another film that I saw that just blew me away was the very first Star Wars. I saw it almost two months before it opened at the Academy, and the theater was half full! No one had ever heard of it; I had a hard time inviting someone — “Star Wars? I’m not interested in that.” When the movie was over, they cleared the audience out of the theater because everyone just sat. They were paralyzed. They had to ask us all to leave because they wanted to lock up the theater. Everybody in the theater was out on the street, sitting on the curb, in a daze. I’ll never, ever forget that."

"I gotta go for one of the Terminators as well — I don’t know which one. [laughs] Probably one, because the first time I saw it… one is always more difficult than the second one, I think. I saw that in Rome after Arnie brought it over when I was doing Red Sonja. We were gonna go out to Rome one night and I said, “I can’t, I’m working, I’ve got a five-o’clock-in-the-morning start,” and he said, “Well, take this — go up to your room and watch this video.” And I watched it — and it was a rough cut of it — and I went, “Oh my god, it’s the greatest film I’ve ever seen.”"