"I would be embarrassed to begin to talk about Dr. Strangelove, because there has been so much written about it. It’s so bleak. And Peter Sellers is perfect. He’s just perfect. Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick built this doomsday political satire, in the fists of the Cold War, and made the end of the world hysterical. We’re bumbling idiots, all of us. We’re all walking through dark rooms of our life, bumping into furniture, and it’s shocking. I think we all enjoy watching people who are in authority positions act like bumbling idiots; it satisfies part of our ego, I’m sure, on some level. Sellers’ commitment to those characters… the scene that stands out is when he’s trying to get change to make the phone call to stop the bomb, and that security guard won’t let him break government property to get the change. The frustration of that is as painful as it is hysterical."

"All right, Stanley Kubrick was a genius, the master of the big, ambitious film that stuns the senses, like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Paths of Glory is one of the last great triumphs of black-and-white filmmaking. It is also a tribute to the talent of Kirk Douglas, who here takes on the role of a French colonel in the trenches of the First World War with such explosive energy that one realizes how many films (and directors) were unworthy of Kirk’s genius as an actor—his first acting role, by the way, was onstage as the servant in Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, with Catherine Cornell, Judith Anderson, and my mother as the sisters and Ruth Gordon as the dreadful sister-in-law. Nobody has ever captured the First World War better on film (except perhaps for Jean Renoir in Grand Illusion, which is in a class by itself). A heartbreaking giant of a film, not a bad shot or a wasted frame in it; perfect filmmaking."

"The Shining. It was the first movie that I saw when I was a kid that, like, really traumatized me. It was mostly the two little girls as well as being in room 237. That was one of the movies that I remember really, after watching that movie, having a problem sleeping. But as I’ve sort of grown up with that movie, what’s been so inspirational about that movie… if you watch that movie, like everybody watches that movie, it’s terrifying, it’s one of the scariest movies of all time. And what I think’s great about it is that it’s not only a horror movie, it’s more a movie about an alcoholic man who hates his family, and then it’s a horror movie. To me, all the best horror movies are a regular movie first and then they’re a horror movie. That’s true with the The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby as well as The Shining. But what’s most exciting to me about The Shining, and there’s a famous quote from the Vivian Kubrick documentary, from Jack Nicholson, where he says he’s been spending his whole career trying to make his performances real, like no one’s ever seen realness onscreen and he’s going to be the one to make it real and he’s going to do something no one’s ever seen before, this quest to make it authentic. And then he’s like, “Then you get someone like Stanley who says, ‘Yeah, Jack, it’s real, but it’s just not interesting.'” After I heard that conversation, if you watch The Shining and don’t get sucked into it just being a great scary movie, if you walk into it and just watch the choices that are being made, it’s an insane movie. Like, everybody’s performance is, like, the stakes are so high, as if every line they say is the end of the world. Every shot is so grandiose. The locations are so unbelievable, and they’re all built, which is also totally insane. It’s like this constructed movie that’s so hypnotic because every time Shelly Duval comes on the screen and screams, “[falsetto] They’re trying to kill Danny!” and it’s like, in any other movie that would just be like a joke. Or Jack Nicholson, if you look at every take of his in the movie, [it] shouldn’t work. It’s all so extreme with his performance. But it’s consistent and, I guess as Stanley Kubrick said, it’s interesting. Because it’s consistent, the movie has this very hypnotic tone to it and it’s something that Kubrick is obviously very known for. It not only is an amazingly terrifying movie and one of the best horror movies of all time, it also is just this really unique approach to filmmaking that I’ve always found really fascinating. It seems to, across the board, raise the stakes and make everybody just operate on this much higher level, and that’s always been very hypnotic to me."

"Stanley Kubrick, Hitchcock, Kurosawa: My father always showed me these directors’ movies, whether I liked it or not. I’m selecting Kurosawa’s High and Low because it’s a little different. It’s based on a story by Ed McBain, and it’s about a kidnapping. During those times in Japan, if you kidnapped someone, you weren’t penalized too much. To have a harsher sentence, other charges, like drugs, were needed. But because of High and Low, the law in Japan changed. The movie had made a positive impact in society. That’s my kind of wish when I create a game. I think entertainment has that power to change society. You don’t have to be a politician or run for a cause to create change. High and Low was, in that sense, really impactful. Entertainment isn’t really just entertainment. It leaves something in people’s hearts and that person might be moved to create something. It’s a push for that person the next day, and I think entertainment should be similar, including games. When you experience something, and then come back to the real world, I want people to feel a little influence in their world."

"The thing that makes The Vanishing so chilling is its unorthodox structure. It starts with a girl being kidnapped at a service station while her boyfriend waits in the car. Then the story picks up three years later with the boyfriend still searching for her while her killer monitors his movements. From very early on we know who the killer is, and we’re fairly sure that the girl is long dead. What makes the film special is that it retains its tension despite giving so much away so early on. There’s an incredible balance of likability and abject coldness in Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu’s performance as the villain; the character is a seemingly respectable family man who, unbeknownst to his wife and children, is in fact a textbook sociopath. Watching him as he patiently plans out the crime makes us feel like we are watching a car crash in slow motion. We know there’s nothing we can do to stop what’s going to happen; in fact it’s already happened. Stanley Kubrick cited this as the most terrifying film he had ever seen. And I can see why."