"If I had to have one favorite movie that I’ve seen a hundred times, it’s probably that. I’m not really sure why I first liked it; I must have been fourteen or something like that when I first saw it. It’s always meant so much to me. Peter Riegert plays a maybe 40-year-old businessman who’s in the oil business and is called and sent up to the coast of Scotland to look into buying some land where they found some oil and he has to negotiate with the local village. [He] thinks it’s going to be a very tough thing to sort of uproot all these people, [and] the comedy is that they’re only too happy to sell out. They’re just trying to negotiate the price up as much as possible. It unfolds at its own pace, and he falls in love with this town and with the sea and cares less and less about the deal. He more and more wants to trade places with the local innkeeper and move to this town and stay there. A beautifully made film and I feel like there was a rash of movies right afterward that sort of tried to capture what he achieved. These people sort of coming to some little town and being transformed. It’s so touching and so funny and warm, and has so many moments of grief and elegance and delicacy. It’s got beautiful music by Mark Knopfler. That might have been the first movie that I felt that strongly about at that sort of formative time. But it’s very strange to feel like that’s the movie, you know? It doesn’t have some young protagonist. [But] from then on I was obsessed with Scotland and Ireland. Wanting desperately to go up there, and then when I did, it was very similar to that feeling. I went [on] a Bill Forsyth binge and watched all of his movies, like Gregory’s Two Girls, and Comfort and Joy, and Breaking In, even, with Burt Reynolds of all people. I wish he were still making movies."

"Number two would be The Temple of Doom, because when I was a kid I was obsessed with Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was, like, my favorite movie. As soon as I saw it I was like, “This movie is amazing.” I was so obsessed with it, and my parents… I don’t know if they knew there was Temple of Doom or if they just didn’t want me to see it because it was a little, like, edgier. Indiana Jones was my life. And then I remember at school one time someone said, “Oh, what about the other movie?” And the idea that there was another movie that I was unaware of was, like, nothing has been more of a shocking reveal since that day. And so I went and tracked down that movie, and what’s really amazing about that movie is it totally defies genre constraints. That movie is totally bonkers and totally sincere. It doesn’t really fit into any genre category. That’s what I always found so amazing and inspiring about that movie. It just seemed like this movie is so great, so any movie could be, like anything is possible. Because in this movie, people’s hearts are getting ripped out, and they’re closing up and then they’re still alive, and children are being enslaved by these sort of like ancient Indian mystical people, and they’re trying to find these stones that, put together, have powers, and there’s famine in the village, and they jump out of a plane on a raft, and everything is so turned up in that movie that it just — all the way down to the mine car race — it’s like one of the most awe-inspiring action or adventure movies I’ve ever seen. Yet it’s still totally grounded in the world of, like, this relatable character. I think that movie shows that a lot of other movies aren’t trying hard enough. Because, even the monkey brains part, it’s just such a memorable movie, it’s so bonkers, and yet it never feels like a joke, it always feels sincere. That to me was like, wow, you can do all these really fantastical elements in movies and you can still take them seriously and it works."