"I’m going to go with The Godfather. It’s weird — I didn’t see The Godfather in theaters. I actually saw it on television. I think when I was a little kid, they ran it in a series. It was on over three or four days on television. I remember just being immediately sucked in, and I was a young kid. My mom was actually amazed that I was just so sucked in. I kept asking her all these questions about the film that she had no answer for, and didn’t really care to sit down and watch it, and couldn’t answer the questions, but I was just so curious and I just loved all the drama of it, you know? And it still, it holds up. My wife and I were just watching it on HBO — I think it was HBO — like last night or the night before. They play part one and part two together now. It’s like five hours of The Godfather."

"Being There is one of my favorite movies. It’s much more precise than a movie like The Last Detail. It’s a type of movie I hope one day to be able to attempt to make. It’s brilliant on every level. It is one of movies that I watch and go, “I probably will never be able to get close to this, but I should try.” The use of television in the movie is spectacular – how what’s happening on the television in the rooms that they’re in reflects or comments on the action. Nobody has ever done that better and people have tried since and always failed. Any time I see something on a TV in a TV show, I know that they’re thinking about how great they did it in Being There. It’s another movie with some of the best performances in comedy history – Jack Warden, Melvyn Douglas, and Shirley MacLaine, so I go back to that a lot."