"Peter Sellers. I think it might be the perfect film. I saw it in college. I just was blown away. This is not a unique argument unto myself, but the key thing of that film is it’s so wonderful to sit and allow this story to unfold and wash over you. The effect it had on me then is that this final scene, I was, like, weeping when this last moment happened. It’s not even a conclusion to anything. It’s not “the hero makes it home from war” or “the orphan gets adopted.” It’s not this big conclusion to an arc. Yet it is. It is like this unbelievable moment of beauty and grace, and the fact that the film never nods to that entirely until this final moment, to have such control over your medium to do that sort of thing, is remarkable in itself, I think. To see Sellers — he is so magnificent — to see him in a role like this, instead of Clouseau or The Party or something like that, that’s wonderful. But still a very large character. It’s just wonderful."

"I have to mention this as one of my favorites. I’ve been lucky enough to work with [producer] Joel Silver. It rewrote the rules on the modern thriller. It set the stage for the expectation that every question needs to be answered, and it has to be big, fun, and emotional, and a movie that can do everything. I try to do Die Hard in every movie that I do, by fulfilling that promise of delivering from the first frame. Obviously many more movies have done that — like Hitchcock — but as a movie that potentially could have gone many ways, it became a masterpiece. Before this movie, you could potentially believe that the bad guys are just bad guys; they don’t have motivation or are dumb. This guy had smart plans and dialogue, and set the bar high. Other movies have met it, but this was one of the first ones and I was blown away when I saw it. As much as I’ve liked other movies, at that time, Die Hard has had more of an influence on my work than the other ones of the time."

"Speaking of that, we must go to Blade Runner — true visual genius, and also in a class never matched. I saw it the first show, the first day, with a bunch of my friends. I can remember that because it was at the Cinerama dome in Hollywood, and it was on that huge screen with that incredible sound system. I still remember that great Vangelis music. But that opening — it’s embedded in my mind, that opening, with that scape of the city and its almost Mayan-like temple formation and those fires out of nowhere shooting up. Plus, Sean Young — that interview [with Harrison Ford’s Deckard] is unbelievable. I got a lovely letter from her last year. I worked with her on Cousins. Amazingly, amazingly beautiful. And of course it has the great Harrison Ford, and Edward James Olmos, and we could just go on and on with that movie. Daryl Hannah is great in it. And the doll guy, William Sanderson, who I got to work with on The Client — he played one of Tommy Lee Jones’ posse. One of the great things about my job is that I’ve been able to cast, sometimes, my favorite people."

"For a myriad of different reasons. It’s the ultimate group of lawless action buddy movies. They have all spawned from this. Every sort of two handed buddy movie as The A-Team and — it all comes from this one film: Seven Samurai. It gave Hollywood a genre. Not only did it influence the western genre very obviously, with Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood, but every genre of outsider, loner, anti-hero. The character played by Toshiro Mifune, that’s the quintessential character in Hollywood. You’ve seen it played by Montgomery Clift. You’ve seen it played by James Dean, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro. They’ve all been influenced in some way by that one character that appears in the Seven Samurai. The wildness. The gregariousness. The mad genius. The outsider. The survivor. Of course, you know the film is an incredibly, beautifully shot film. Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest writers of all time. It speaks for itself. I’ve seen it well over a hundred times. But years ago. 20 years ago — possibly the first. Maybe even 25 years ago was the first time I saw it. An extraordinary movie."

"Ultimately, there is ambition in the Apu Trilogy – he’s leaving his village and he marries into a different class. But there’s also that incredible friendship that runs through the Apu Trilogy. I return to the Apu Trilogy constantly. I saw it first in art school and I felt overwhelmed by it; as someone coming from Miami and who hadn’t seen anything of the world, I was just like, India, it’s too much for me. But for some reason it really resonated and I have returned to it so often. I find Satyajit Ray’s filmmaking so lyrical and there’s a real economy to the way he shoots the film. It’s all just pans; there’s no kind of dual camera movement ever going on. [Cinematographer Christopher] Blauvelt and I had a similar rule, except for when we’re in the Chief Factor’s house, when there’s like this more expressive kind of filmmaking going on and it feels a little grander. We had this really economical way of shooting; people moving in the frame and we pan one way or the other. But there were no parallel moves happening at once."

"I saw it years ago and I was in the movie — as far as I was concerned, I was the star of the movie [laughs]. I so identified with her — with Olivia de Havilland. And Vivien Leigh. Oh, I was in the movie! It was a time that I wish I had been born but I didn’t want to be so uncomfortable, know what I mean? But I just love that time in history. I love the costumes. I thought the cinematography was extraordinary. For that time it was such a magnificent piece. And Clark Gable – I didn’t learn until much later that he had rotten teeth [laughs]. But I adored him. I was with the woman who played the baby. She passed away this past year. She was at a party that Esther Williams gave about two years ago, maybe three years ago. And she called me over to her and told me she loved my work and she told me she was the baby in Gone with the Wind. She was the little baby when they were running away from the fire. She was in the horse and buggy with the nanny."

"I saw Blue for the first time when I was in film school. I checked out a VHS tape from the library and watched it on a twelve-inch TV/VCR. The movie finished and I sat staring at the dark screen while the tape auto-rewound. When it reached the beginning, I pressed “Play” and watched it a second time. When it stopped the second time, I turned everything off, went to bed, and stared at the ceiling. A week or so later, I finished the trilogy and thought, If these are called movies, we need a new name for everything else. I’ve never seen music sewn through film so deeply, as if the actors were thinking the soundtrack while they were acting. However he did it, Kieślowski caught the chaos of being human without the mania (for instance, the elderly woman carefully disposing of recyclables). His films are life-affirming for the jaded—they are the smartest and sexiest of unintentionally philosophical films, never talking down or forgetting to entertain. And the ending of Red—well, isn’t that the ending of everything?"

"I saw Blue for the first time when I was in film school. I checked out a VHS tape from the library and watched it on a twelve-inch TV/VCR. The movie finished and I sat staring at the dark screen while the tape auto-rewound. When it reached the beginning, I pressed “Play” and watched it a second time. When it stopped the second time, I turned everything off, went to bed, and stared at the ceiling. A week or so later, I finished the trilogy and thought, If these are called movies, we need a new name for everything else. I’ve never seen music sewn through film so deeply, as if the actors were thinking the soundtrack while they were acting. However he did it, Kieślowski caught the chaos of being human without the mania (for instance, the elderly woman carefully disposing of recyclables). His films are life-affirming for the jaded—they are the smartest and sexiest of unintentionally philosophical films, never talking down or forgetting to entertain. And the ending of Red—well, isn’t that the ending of everything?"

"I saw Blue for the first time when I was in film school. I checked out a VHS tape from the library and watched it on a twelve-inch TV/VCR. The movie finished and I sat staring at the dark screen while the tape auto-rewound. When it reached the beginning, I pressed “Play” and watched it a second time. When it stopped the second time, I turned everything off, went to bed, and stared at the ceiling. A week or so later, I finished the trilogy and thought, If these are called movies, we need a new name for everything else. I’ve never seen music sewn through film so deeply, as if the actors were thinking the soundtrack while they were acting. However he did it, Kieślowski caught the chaos of being human without the mania (for instance, the elderly woman carefully disposing of recyclables). His films are life-affirming for the jaded—they are the smartest and sexiest of unintentionally philosophical films, never talking down or forgetting to entertain. And the ending of Red—well, isn’t that the ending of everything?"