"Then the second one – and let’s say, this was in no particular order – but A Man Escaped, the [Robert] Bresson movie. That has to be my favorite movie of all time, just because it always makes me cry at the end, because I feel like I’ve achieved something that the character achieves. And it tells you what happens in the title, and it makes it no less suspenseful the entire way. You’re literally feeling the sound of the gravel as he puts his foot down – those shots of the foot or the spoon going into the slot. All of these things, the editing of it, the character, the way he’s using these actors who you don’t really know, they just – you feel like they’re real people. It’s just so perfectly put together, and it’s something where I kind of feel like I’m going along with the escape in a way that’s just done by a master. In a weird way, I feel like Bresson is the Fontaine character in that movie. But what’s weird is I’ve watched it again recently, and I had a totally different feeling of it, where it was more about society and how people are talking to each other. And then you realize Bresson is just kind of making the same movie every time, just with different [settings and characters]. One’s World War II, one’s Lancelot."

"My second film is an Israeli film called “The Kindergarten Teacher.” It’s a story about a kindergarten teacher, a woman who discovers that one of her young students, this cherubic little 5-year-old boy, is a poetic prodigy. The movie is, on one level, a kind of a psychological thriller, and a very disturbing one, about her growing obsession with this boy. And her sense that it’s her mission to save him from a society that isn’t gonna care about him. It also works, though, as a critique of that society; Israel, in the director’s view, has abandoned its cultural heritage, its commitment to art, and has become a materialistic and shallow society. The filmmaking was so simple and clear, and it was a very suspenseful movie. I was sort of frustrated because it had a very small release in the United States. It didn’t have Juliette Binoche in it [laughs], so it was not even on the radar, necessarily, of people who go and see movies with subtitles. And yet, it’s very entertaining. But also with this theme: “Why is poetry important? What are the values of a society that kind of push it to the side or don’t take it seriously? And how do you counteract that?” It’s just a very rich movie that I wish more people had seen."