"I would have picked Crooklyn but you guys haven’t put it out (yet), which I really do believe is one of Spike Lee’s most undervalued films. But Do the Right Thing had a similar influence on me growing up. It’s Brooklyn, it’s beautiful, it’s got a cast that is absolutely flawless—too many great performances to mention—and it was revolutionary and in-your-face. The cinematography by Ernest Dickerson is stunning and iconic. I felt so alive the first time I saw this film in high school and have in every subsequent viewing."

"Well, in no particular order, and not to be sycophantic, number one would be INLAND EMPIRE, the last David Lynch movie. I saw it four times in the theater, at the IFC theater on Sixth Avenue in New York, and I loved it because it plays with a lot of narrative conventions but then disposes with them. It made of lot of more traditional filmmaking seem sort of adolescent to me. And I might be alone in my opinion, but I think it’s the best movie David Lynch has ever made."

"I saw this when I was twenty-five or twenty-six and really confused about my work. I was so discouraged and had stopped writing, and this movie made me excited to start working again. Akerman was doing something with pace and composition and time that I’d always wanted to do but had been too chicken to acknowledge or go toward. Watching this made me realize that you should make the kind of art you want to see, which sounds kind of obvious but was a big revelation to me at the time."

"My introduction to Cassvettes. It’s an opus. I liked it but I did not love it the first time I saw it. The movie takes patience but then you realize that’s the genius of it, the imitative way it puts the audience in a kind of narrative stupor. And once you’re there, it runs you through every emotion. So good luck with that. Also, Gena Rowlands is a goddess who walks among us. Of all the tributes to Cassavetes, this is surely the most minor but . . . my cat is named Mabel. Similar behavior."

"Well I guess this is cheating because it’s 10 movies, but I like [Krzysztof Kieślowski’s] Decalogue a lot. That’s one director I was sad when he passed away, because I would have loved to have worked with him — although he never really worked with American actors. I love all of his films but Decalogue is very satisfying. When I watched it for the first time I saw them all in two days, as this little cinema in London. I watched five the first day and the second five the next day."

"The movie Churchill! Well of course, yeah! I mean, I had hearing aids on but I couldn’t catch exactly all the words, but I knew the meaning behind them. It was just marvelous how, I guess, a politician could absorb so much of the strategy required to deal with the challenges that Great Britain faced. The guy who played Churchill, when I saw him in real life, I can’t imagine how they made him up to look like Winnie. He was bouncing all over the place, making facial expressions all the time."