"I guess the next one would be Fanny & Alexander. I had to put a Bergman on here, and I really struggled to choose between Fanny & Alexander and Cries and Whispers, especially because Cries and Whispers was a film that I screened for the crew of Hereditary. But the television version of Fanny & Alexander, which is five hours long, strikes me as the greatest of the Bergman films. It just has everything. It’s got his humor. It has his sense of wonder and it’s so dreamlike and so gorgeous. The performances are so incredible. It’s so sprawling. Then it gets incredibly bleak when the father dies and the children are shipped off to live with the bishop, who is one of the great forbidding Bergman villains, but that’s just a film I love and adore."

"Second film: All That Jazz, Bob Fosse. It’s an incredibly hopeful, uplifting art journey and you know, on the one hand it’s about a man who is killing himself through over-work and who is over-extended and miserable and is going to die of a heart attack, and on the other hand, it’s Bob Fosse’s celebration of the fact that he didn’t die of a heart attack. He came through, and now he’s going to take the events that precipitated him into his heart attack, create a roman à clef around them, and build something magical, which he does. There’s a sort of strange and lovely honesty to it that, the first time I saw it when I was about 15/16 and it was on television, I found arresting, and it’s magic."

"It’s one of the great endings to a movie ever when Willy asks Charlie what happened to the little boy who got everything he ever wanted. “You don’t know? He lived happily ever after!” And then the glass elevator breaks through the glass roof. It’s incredible. I worked briefly on a television show with Mel Stuart, the director, and heard all sorts of fantastic stories about that remarkable film. And of course I knew all the songs – I still do. I have a 5-year-old, but I haven’t shown it to her yet. It’s kind of scary – that guy who shows up with the little shopping carriage and makes that little speech about how nobody who goes in ever comes out. And the Oompa Loompas. And that boat ride – woo, acid trip!"

"In preparation for my Christmas film, White Reindeer, I watched this movie and wrote down a description of every single shot, including each camera move and change in blocking. Not only is Heaven Sirk’s most fully realized, subversive takedown of suburban hypocrisy, it’s also the best Christmas movie of all time, and such a marvel of style and camera direction that you barely notice how intricate its construction is until you force yourself to examine it. Sirk said that, in cinema, “motion is emotion,” and that ethos reaches its zenith in the zoom in on Jane Wyman’s reflection in a television screen. This is nothing less than the greatest dolly movie in cinema history. If anyone ever tells you irony and sincerity can’t coexist, tell them they are painfully, tragically wrong."