"Probably everybody has that on their list. [Star Wars] came out and I just finished my sophomore year at CalArts. The May of ’77, saw it opening weekend at the Chinese Theatre. It worked in so many ways, but one of the things personally [that] was so inspiring [was] how it entertained an audience to a new level. I was there with a packed audience. I waited six hours. Towards the climax, when Luke is in the X-Wing and he’s going down the trench, I was just shaking I was so excited. And I’d never seen an audience so excited. First of all, it was everybody, from kids to adults, teenagers. Everybody was going crazy for this film. The quality of the storytelling, where it’s one foot in sort of the past and one foot in the future, I was so impressed by that. I came out and said, “That’s what I want to do with animation.” Many of my friends left animation [because of Star Wars] and went to actual special effects. At that time, animation was thought of just for kids. I saw this and said, “No, no, I want to entertain audiences.” That’s all I think about when I make my movies."

"I never tire of using this film in the classroom, because there’s always more to glean from it, and I say this as someone who has seen it many, many times. Before I saw it, I had already read Todd’s script, and I did not have any understanding of what it was going to be. I just remember seeing it in New York City at a small screening, and I was in the movie for so long after that—I couldn’t shake it. I came out so hyperaware of every little thing. At the time I was living above a dry cleaner, and I became obsessed with every smell around me. Julianne Moore is amazing in the movie—is there a better performance? This is a film that, if you don’t know anything about it, you certainly won’t know where it’s going. I remember riding in a cab with some big film critic at the time who said, “You won’t believe what I saw today! Some story about a housewife who gets sick—can you believe it?” He had no idea what to make of it, but people have really revised their opinions since then. It’s so masterful, and it’s some of my favorite Todd Haynes writing—it’s so darkly funny."

"An early work by Resnais. It’s only a half hour long, but I’ve not seen a film of any length that matches it in emotional resonance.
 It transcends the documentary form. I saw it around the time I first saw The Night of the Hunter, in the late fifties, and I was about to film my first documentary. Night and Fog begins with a beautiful color landscape beneath a blue sky. The camera cranes down to reveal a long stretch of barbed wire, followed by shots of vast fields overgrown with tall grass, trees, and wildflowers. The camera tracks slowly across the placid landscape, dotted with abandoned red brick buildings that could have been warehouses or barns; then a sudden shock cut to black-and-white footage of victims of the Holocaust. The long, tracking color shots of the killing fields of Auschwitz and Majdanek, only ten years after the end of the Second World War, are intercut with horrific black-and-white shots of piles of dead bodies, rooms filled with women’s hair, and personal effects. A dry, dispassionate narration is heard throughout, written by Jean Cayrol, a survivor of the camps. Night and Fog is one of Resnais’ first “memory” films and points the way to his later masterpieces, Hiroshima mon amour and . . ."