"So, Raging Bull. We got a young De Niro, who put the weight on and took it off. “I got no choice!” I mean again, its something very specific to a culture and neighborhood. A young Pesci, Scorsese, all the acting in it, I just connected with it. I laughed and I got uncomfortable at the same time. I felt every emotion every time I watch that film. That’s a great night at the cinema for me when I’ve laughed, when I’ve cried, when I was angry, and when I was turned on. All of those emotions are happening when I watch that film. It’s like putting my favorite audio book on. Sometimes I can just close my eyes and listen to them talk, and there’s such a rhythm. It just feels so authentic and this is just regular conversation. It was almost like they didn’t even have a script. I think that’s a testament to the acting and the writing."

"Rewatching this film on the other side of my twenties, the overwhelming fact of everyone’s youth really hit me. They’re just eighteen! And suddenly, the whole movie is Degrassi. Suzanne is Paige, Guillaume is Spinner, Bertrand is Jimmy. And Spinner and Jimmy think it’s really funny to take Paige out on dates and make her pay the bills. Then Spinner takes the joke way too far and Jimmy’s caught in the middle, wanting more than anything to seem cool. The final scene at the pool, the bathing suit competition so to speak—everything about it is casually devastating: the rhythm of the cuts, the lighting, the suntan lotion choreography. Bertrand (Jimmy) realizes he and Sophie (Ashley) aren’t superior to Suzanne, they’re just skinny. Man, that scene hits hard. Like Degrassi, Rohmer knows that the most interesting thing about teens is that they’re works in progress. Like, sometimes they actually learn a lesson."

"I think probably Seven Samurai, by Kurosawa. I think I saw that when I was about 15 or 16 in the cinema. It’s such a big old chunk of a film, and it’s always a treat to sit down with that movie. It’s so perfectly framed, and perfectly judged; it’s basically the blueprint for most action cinema — expect that it’s much more intelligent than most action cinema. There’s characters in it that hardly only get a couple of lines, but you feel that they’re totally fleshed out. The massive battle scene at the end, which should be completely confusing, is instead just completely clear — you never worry about where you are, you never don’t understand what their plan is — and I think that’s something that you rarely see in cinema now. The closest you get to it, sometimes, is I think in James Cameron’s work — where it’s very, very methodically plotted and planned, and you feel the mechanics of everything that’s been very carefully formulated."