"The first film would be The Professional. I think in France it’s called Léon. Natalie Portman, Gary Oldman; it was one of the first films I saw with Jean Reno and man, it just had this cool vibe and assurance. It was about this assassin with a heart of gold trying to take care of young girl he doesn’t even know – and Gary Oldman is giving this insane performance [as the villain]. [It was] the first time I discovered Gary Oldman, and I was like, “Damn, he’s like a dope actor. I’d like to be on that level one day.” Plus, it was shot in New York, and I was raised in New York and in Jersey as a young boy, up until I was 10, so that’s an element of familiarity to it. I grew up fighting, and both my parents were Marines, so I’ve always been into this element of super-spying and assassins stuff; and there were so many just cool, chilled-out moments in there where Reno was just so cool, man. He was the man. I just loved what he brought to it. I loved the whole film, and again, I loved the way Gary Oldman played this role, because he was the villain, yes, but he wasn’t any typical villain; you believe that he thought what he was doing was absolutely right. That performance was great."

"The Graduate directed by Mike Nichols. It’s just a perfect film. And it was, I think, the first non-student real film for Dustin Hoffman. It’s just a beautiful, perfectly written… perfectly shot, perfectly acted film, where you have Dustin Hoffman who has bedded both Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross and he breaks up the marriage. I saw it as a little kid because I lived with my mom and she liked to go to the movies. She couldn’t always get a babysitter and so now and then I would get taken to films that were quite adult. There’s not necessarily nudity, because there doesn’t need to be. The thing is so well written; the adult themes and just how screwed up adults are is on full display in The Graduate. You can tell all these people are just so damn talented, and you look at a young Dustin Hoffman and you go, “Damn, man. Look at the career you’re about to have, dude. You’ve got it.” His talent was just so huge yet so innate in that he’s not gonna fail. He’s one of those people like, “Man, you were born to act.” I’ve tried to get to Buck Henry to get him to tell me stories about The Graduate and I’ve hung out with him a couple of times. And I’m like, “You wrote The Graduate!” And he’s always very funny and kinda belligerent to me, “Ah, shut up… Rwagh, Rwagh.” I’m like, “OK [laughing].”"

"I saw this when I was in college, and there were a lot of things about it that made me swoon. I watched it over and over again. I couldn’t stop. It does this incredible thing where it stops the narrative, like Godard would, to comment on the story from an omniscient perspective. But where Godard does it in a really cold way, Cuarón does it with such warmth. It made me feel like you could do anything; you could stop your movie and do wild shit and still be incredibly emotionally engaging. The movie also depicts sexuality in a way that I’d never seen before. Long before our culture became obsessed with sexual fluidity and where people fall on the Kinsey scale, this movie said that it was just a reality that the intimacy between friends can also be sexual, that it’s not so cut and dry. It’s about the depth of a friendship, and it was just a revelation for me. That moment when the two men kiss was like, woah, that’s right and that’s real. And the cinematography is insane and showed how you can make beautiful images with so little. It’s a simple road movie about friends, but it’s so gorgeous. Why aren’t we elevating simple stories to the level of epics? Cuarón does that. All his movies are epics, no matter how small or big they are."

"To me, these are the two best resistance films ever made. And each is its director’s best film. I saw them very early, and they were very formative for me. They really show the complex nature of resistance, glorifying it but also showing the compromises you have to make when you’re in wartime. I love that The Battle of Algiers starts off with that line: “None of this is documentary footage.” What audacity to be like: this is going to feel and look so real that you’re going to think this is a documentary, so I need to tell you that it’s not. It’s a way of setting the bar so high, and then the film lives up to it and surpasses it! You feel the ambition in all of it. It’s just spectacular in every sense of the word. Army of Shadows is similar, though obviously it’s much more in Melville’s cinematic language. Something that has always struck me is that by the end of the film everyone does exactly what you would expect them to do, what they’re supposed to do, but it still just leads to fucked-up situations. It’s this real mess of an ending, but it’s all grounded in very real decisions that I can sympathize with across the board. It’s rare to see a film that gets to the humanity of every decision, to the point where they’re lived-in, not just plot points."

"I watched this for the first time at noon on September 28th. I remember the date very well, because it was the same day my own film opened in theaters, an event far less notable to me than finally getting to lay eyes on Luca Guadagino’s remake of one of my all-time favorite horror movies. I was beside myself with excitement. The lights went down in that little subterranean screening room and it didn’t take long for the film to confound every one of my expectations. What did I think I was getting myself into? Something lithely sensual? A blend of horror and eroticism? Any male-gaze-ish expectations I might have had were thwarted early on when Madame Blanc asks Suzie Bannion what it felt like when she performed one of her famous dances. “Like fucking,” says Suzie. “A man?” Blank asks, but Suzie shakes her head. “I was thinking an animal.” Just like that, the movie slapped some sense into me, and then it proceeded to keep slapping me, harder and harder, until it ended and I didn’t know what to think anymore other than that I wanted to watch it again right away. I had to wait until Halloween night. It wasn’t enough. A friend who saw an early cut told me that it was a whole lot of movie. It surely is, and my arms aren’t being enough to hug all of it."

"Requiem for a Dream is a really interesting film. It changed my idea of what people really wanted to see. Because I came from the UK, as a European film director, it was interesting to see how American studios or financiers were really into European cinema. They would always quote certain movies that I made that nobody else had seen — like Gangster No. 1. I was amazed, like, ‘Wow, you’ve actually seen that movie?’ And it dawned on me that people in America aren’t that dumb after all, you know? They’re kind of smart — much smarter than I was about movies. And when I saw Requiem for a Dream, I understood it. This guy got cash, he got money, to make this movie. It’s quite a hard movie to actually sell — can you imagine trying to sell that movie? And for that alone I think Aronofsky is a genius. I like what he does. I even liked The Fountain. The Wrestler is a great movie; I think Pi is a genius piece of work. I think he deserves a lot of praise. For people like me, who come from Europe and go to America and think nobody’s going to know what I’ve done, I’m a struggling filmmaker, and then suddenly you go into a studio and the head exec is like, ‘Gangster No. 1, I loved that film, it had this and that person in it…’ They see everything. I was quite cheered by that."

"In terms of mind-blowing experiences, I would say the first film was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, just because I think — I’m pretty sure — that’s the first time I ever saw a live action movie in a movie theater as a kid. My dad took me and my brother to see it. I think up till then I’d only seen one animated movie in a movie theater. I think it was Robin Hood, which, for some reason, was really boring to me. But we went to see Willy Wonka, and I was so blown away, and it so freaked me out, that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for years. I had watched movies on TV and stuff, but that was the first time I think I was old enough to go to the movies, and be able to sit through a movie without wanting to get up and run around the theater. Just seeing it that big and getting sucked into it. I don’t even think I realized those were actors and that anything was fake. I think I just thought it was all real, that Charlie was a real kid, and Willy Wonka was a real person. I really think I thought it was real. I really thought the whole family lived in that one room. I was probably in second grade or something… So I probably didn’t actually think it was real, but I responded to it like it was real."

"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."