"I hadn’t seen Sideways in a number of years, and recently saw it again, and sat down with it and was overwhelmed at how much more meaningful it had become in the years since I had seen it. I don’t know why – I guess it’s just really cheesy: Like wine, it had aged for me. (I’d take that out, that was so cheesy!). But it had matured for me as a story, or perhaps I had grownup to meet the story – it was so lyrical and so authentic in every moment. Stories about failure, to me, are more meaningful as I get older. That movie also swings big, and that’s another thing that I like about it. That monologue, Virginia Madsen’s monologue… it’s just achingly romantic. [And] the end, where he drives up, sort of mirroring The Graduate, but it’s Dustin Hoffman, the loser version, which is way closer to me than the heroic version in The Graduate. [The movie] just keeps curving into itself, and out of itself, and it’s just an incredibly satisfying, enjoyable, meditative movie. It’s got some incredible performances – everyone is a delight, everyone is just incredibly fun, and each scene has something interesting happening in it. [Sandra Oh] was another inspired bit of casting. Her mother, and the kid, and she’s amazing, and the motorcycle helmet rage was one of the most terrifying things I’ve seen on film – and a flopping penis, that’s always good."

"Another one’s Coming Home, by Hal Ashby. I mean, I love all of his films — if there’s any filmmaker I would love to be, it would be him. It’s just an amazing film. You think about something like Harold and Maude, which is to me one of the most flawless films there is. There’s always the great films, like Harold and Maude, sure; but then there’s ones that people kind of forget about, you know, or they sort of get swept to the side a little — and I think Coming Home is one of those films. Even The Last Detail is one of those films. But Coming Home: amazing performances, it’s about something, amazing emotional stuff, and it’s just about people — people trying to connect. There’s a simplicity to it, but it’s really engaging the entire time. Waldo Salt wrote the script. I saw a documentary on him. I think just knowing how a film’s made makes me love it as well. He wrote a 200-, 300-page script for this thing, and went and talked to vets and recorded them for like a year. Jon Voight went and lived with paraplegics and war vets who had been injured and stayed in his wheelchair the entire time. It was just a good commitment to making a film, you know, whereas these days it’s like, “I’ll get my double to do it.” I feel like that was made at a time when people still had passion."

"The whole feel of this film was something that woke me up to cinema in a way. Before this film it was very much an Amblin world for me. Lots of Indiana Jones and John Hughes and Willy Wonka (the original) and Van Damme action movies and Richard Pryor comedies like Brewster’s Millions, etc. Then a friend introduced me to Paris, Texas. The aching loneliness and sense of lost love that pervades the film from the arid desolation of the desert landscape to the haunting strings of Ry Cooder’s soundtrack just blew me away. Maybe I was 17 or 18 when I saw it, but it stayed with me, and I go back to it about once a year. It also has one of the most honest portrayals of the loss of love between a couple, and the inherent danger within the nature of obsession. This lost love is broken down for the audience in what, to me, is possibly most quietly powerful monologue ever delivered in any film I’ve seen; when Harry Dean Stanton’s character, Travis, finally sits with the woman he loved and lost, and he recounts their story to her. Travis has to turn the chair around, so he’s facing away from her while he speaks. I assume because it’s too much to look at her while he’s expressing where and how such love disintegrated. Yeah, it’s a beautiful, beautiful film."