"I first saw two of my favorite personal documentaries in 1985 and 1986. Both greatly influenced me as a filmmaker. Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March offered up a neurotic self-portrait of the filmmaker’s pursuit of Southern women, while in God’s Country, Louis Malle visits with struggling farmers in Glencoe, Minnesota, a town an hour away from the Twin Cities, where I was born and raised. Sherman’s March has enjoyed far greater acclaim and exposure, but God’s Country is ultimately the more sophisticated film. These are both portraits of human pathos. But where McElwee depicts seemingly wacky Southern women with a palpable sense of disrespect for his subjects, Malle interacts with equally extreme characters in the North and manages to express a profound sense of respect and admiration, enabling us to feel sympathy for them and, ultimately, for ourselves. No disrespect to McElwee though: one of my favorite reviews of my film The Royal Road (by Bérénice Reynaud in Senses of Cinema) calls it “a sort of butch reply” to Sherman’s March."

"I really was trying to avoid Citizen Kane, but I would say Kane and the first fourth, the first half of The Magnificent Ambersons, for, you know, reasons that are obvious. I mean, it’s all miserably compromised after the first half — actually after the first third, I think — but I think the first twenty, twenty-five minutes of Ambersons is in many ways richer than anything in Kane, and that really is saying something. It struck a tone in American moviemaking; it was just absolutely new to me as a kid when I first saw that. I had never seen that kind of lightly ironic, very bittersweet, but achingly nostalgic… It’s just great, it’s just great. It’s also got probably one of my single favorite shots in cinema, that silhouette combined with the two couples after the ball. It’s the most incredible moment, and you just can’t believe you’re seeing it, and it lasts only as long as it could humanly last, and then it’s over. It’s great."

"This movie is still my favorite movie of last year, and I think I have to name it because I just thought it was an extraordinary film and I still think about it a lot. I saw it in the theater and it really hit me like a ton of bricks. I think he’s a really extraordinary director, David Michôd. Ben Mendelsohn and Jackie Weaver — every single performance in that I was so impressed with, but in particular just the direction. That’s a director that I appreciate the sense that he allows his actors to just act and have these really quiet moments, and he really just created this world — the atmosphere of that movie was amazing. For a first film, too. The way that he was able to create a level of tension with actors not really saying much or doing much, it was just what he did with the camera. There are not a lot of films where you can just appreciate the camerawork and what a significant aspect of the whole film it is. It was perfectly curated."

"I could go on and on. Like The Searchers, with John Wayne. It’s a wonderful film. Brilliantly shot, you know. And Wayne’s playing a bigot in it. A man who’s got a hatred about him, but by the end of it he changes. It’s such a great performance, hero playing a man like that. But you know, I got a million films; I could probably give you another five or 10 that would be totally different. You know a film that changed my mind about everything? I was in New York years ago, walking along on my own, and I saw a film called The Tin Drum. I went in and it started and I thought, “F–k, it’s a German film,” and they’ve got these subtitles and I thought, “I can’t be bothered with this.” But I sat there, and within 10 minutes I forgot about reading it and I just sat there watching this film. What a film. And it kind of changed my mind about film-making."

"Haha, I was thinking, there are millions of bleedin’ classic albums I could have chosen, but that album came out when I was on holiday with my kids, and I bought it because I’d seen her on The X Factor. She came on singing ‘If I Was A Boy’, and I thought, fucking hell man, if there was ever an example of what real talent is… you know what I mean? You’ve got some quite talented kids on that show, but then she comes on and it’s like all the lights on the planet have been turned on. And I really loved that song, I don’t know why, it just got me somehow: girls imagining what boys do, and so on. Unfortunately I didn’t see her at Glastonbury 'cos I had to leave, but my kids stuck around and saw it, and I watched it on the telly, and I loved how she put a lot of effort in and embraced the whole thing. Somehow she doesn’t seem as fake as a lot of those other pop-soul artists."

"If we want to talk about the movies that have made an impact in what I do in the action realm — Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. I’ve watched that countless times. That is a standalone pioneer in action movies, and anyone that was inspired by Bruce Lee…I’m sure everyone that has ever done an action movie has just drooled over how full of talent Bruce Lee was, and how unique he was. [On the first time he saw Enter the Dragon]: I was a kid; my brother had posters of Bruce Lee on the wall. My brother’s you know, punching me and he was a lot bigger than me; I was like, what? I couldn’t see the movie, I was tiny. But as soon as I was able to steal the VHS and stick it in, it was like, Gee, this guy is just…so avant-garde, he’s years above, so far ahead of his own time. So that made a massive impact in my life."

"It’s a French movie. Came out, like, four or five years ago. It feels to me like the French The Godfather. That would be one way of describing it. It’s about a French-Algerian guy who goes to jail, and watching him work the system of being in jail amongst the — sort of, like, negotiating a specific French jail, and how he’s able to navigate a very tricky world of his Muslim identity, French identity, criminal identity and drug-dealing identity, all these various things. It’s super intense and a super beautifully laid out story. It’s a crazy-engaging movie. Came out in 2010. I would highly recommend that. [Director Jacques Audiard] came out with another movie called Rust and Bone in the last couple years. I just remember seeing [A Prophet] and I was really blown away by it. When I saw it, it genuinely felt like watching The Godfather, watching Al Pacino as a younger man slowly navigate and figure out how to dominate a world that seems to be, you know, overwhelming him."