"King Kong — the original 1933 King Kong, which is the film that got me interested in filmmaking when I saw it when I was eight years old."

"Still my favorite Cronenberg by far. What can I say? The first time I saw it, it oozed up under my skin, and it has never left."

"Georges Franju’s eerie, face-transplant melodrama has stuck in my memory since the first time I saw it as a freaked-out kid on late-night TV."

"I saw it when I was in college and I went back and saw it again, and then I went back and saw it again. It has all my favorite actors in it. Big as life, absolutely in their top form. It doesn’t get any better than that anywhere. I saw them up on the screen and I thought “I want to do that, that’s what I want to do.” That had a big impact on me when I was a kid, coming up. We learn these movies like old friends, they’re like songs that when you hear them enough you know every note and moment, you know when he’s going to look over and you expect the lines, you’re doing them along with the film. Brilliant, brilliant piece of filmmaking. On everybody’s part. Robert Duvall. Spectacular stuff — [Duvall has] forgotten more about acting than most of us will ever learn."

"I saw this recently for the first time, per Xan Cassavetes’s recommendation. The flashback sequences are painstaking. This is a kind of cinema that is rare and beautiful."

"I saw this when I was maybe twelve years old. The father’s suicide, the dead guy in the tree—images that bothered me for decades. Chop that meat."