"I love Time Bandits, and it obviously fits into the kids’-adventure-fantasy stuff that I’m into. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was actually the first film I ever saw in a theater when I was eight years old, and I was euphoric. After that I rented every Terry Gilliam movie. In Time Bandits, he mixes animation and live action, which is an important aesthetic element in the movies I make. When I was twenty I had a short at the London Film Festival, and I was there with my friend so we were traveling from party to party, drinking and eating, because we didn’t have any money. At one party we saw Terry Gilliam, and I started talking to this woman about seeing Baron Munchausen and how it made me want to make movies, and she said, “Well, my husband is Terry Gilliam, you should go say hello to him.” So I went over to him and said, “I just need you to know that I’m here because you made me want to make movies,” and he said, “I’m so sorry.”"

"The next I would say is La Strada because, well, do I really have to say? I feel like it’s sort of self-explanatory. Like [laughs] Giulietta Masina, I mean every performance, but particularly the last scene in the movie, with Anthony Quinn and just being on the beach, and everything about that movie is beautiful. And there’s something always about his films that, knowing that audio was recorded post shooting the film — I’m pretty sure that’s true with that movie — just to know, in a way, if it is true, it’s just to know that there are two sort of performances happening simultaneously. You can see and hear that. And I love that idea and what skill and sort of the presence to this day that movie has. And it’s also personally really resonant because my father said after he saw that movie, it was what made him want to make movies, and when I finally saw it when I was a teenager, I understood why. So it inevitably has a resonance beyond the brilliance of the movie itself."