"Preston Sturges at his best. This was the first of his films I ever saw, in a revival at the Regency in New York, and it was a revelation. You’ve never heard dialogue so funny or move so fast. Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda are hysterical, and it has maybe my favorite line ever in a movie—Fonda asks a fancy old society lady at a dinner party if he’s missed anything. She says, “The fish was a poem.”"

"What would be my number four? I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten that far in my categorizing of films. Maybe 2001 by Stanley Kubrick. It’s a film I saw early on with my father that had a really profound effect on me. That movie, I think, is pretty amazing filmmaking. And to see it at a young age — I remember going with my dad to watch it. It was a very, very profound film to watch."

"This was a mythic, elusive film because it was banned from the UK. It took me a long time to track it down, but I heard many a story about it — helicopter decapitation and the guy with the screwdriver in his ear. That stuff was just so fascinating to me as I grew up, and when I finally saw it, it did not disappoint. It obviously eventually led to me making a film with a similar title"

"An early sixties, black and white British gem from John Schlesinger. Tom Courtenay plays a dreamer who wants to bust out of his small town with the help of Julie Christie. One of the saddest endings to a comedy I’ve ever seen. I saw John Schlesinger give a Q&A after a special screening at the Film Forum, and he said he didn’t feel that the ending was sad at all, just appropriate to Billy’s character."

"Wedding Crashers I just think is absolutely hilarious. Old School was like the funniest movie I’d seen in a long time, before this. Vince and Owen, at that point in their careers, there was nothing better. I just thought that movie was so, so funny. And Christopher Walken, and Rachel McAdams, and Bradley Cooper — that was like the first time people really saw him. It had so many lines in it. Vince Vaughn was on fire back then."

"It just really changed my life. I was quite young when I saw it, about 14, but it must have gone in – I ended up wearing the very same jacket as David Hemmings in the film. It's a unique document about what a carve-up it was, the Crimean War. It was a very unpopular film when it came out. I actually flew back from LA to see it in a cinema once, it was shown so rarely."

"I’m going to throw The Goonies in there, because as a kid, that was just the ultimate fantasy. That was every kid’s fantasy. I watched it over and over and over. The fact that they slid through the rocks, and she’s playing the bone piano, and all that kind of stuff. You’re like, “What? Is this really happening?” And it never gets old. I saw it recently with my daughter, and I was still into it."

"I can’t leave out Kubrick. I think my favorite Kubrick movie is kind of tied between A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. The Shining meant a lot to me. It was the first movie that made me really want to act. I love Jack Nicholson in that movie. I didn’t know who Jack Nicholson was at the time — I was like 11 when I saw it, but something about what he was doing in that movie just fascinated me."

"The way that the little girl listens to the song she sings again and again really influenced how I try to use music. It’s music that comes from within the story and somehow resonates with the territory that the film is exploring. I was so impressed by that when I saw it for the first time. The way I used music in Gloria, even though it is quite different, somehow owes a lot to this film."

"Yep. A symphony of visuals comes together to communicate the essence of basic humanity. There’s no suitable combination of words to match the combination of cinematic choices that Kurosawa made here. I was lucky enough to see it on film the first time I saw it, on a big screen, with good sound, sitting next to my wife, who was also seeing it for the first time. That’s a combination of beauty that’s hard to replicate."