"I saw this movie for the first time at the Elgin Theater on Eighth Avenue as part of a double feature with The Tenant a long time ago, when I was young and scared. I didn’t like it. But I was young and scared. Eighth Avenue used to be scary. I honestly don’t remember why I didn’t like it, but just a few years later I would be mocking my younger, uninformed self. I absolutely love everything about this movie, from its cheesiness (camera as murder weapon) to its sheer profundity (camera as murder weapon). Anna Massey should be a household name."

"The next one I was going to say, which is Lawrence of Arabia, I actually just saw for the first time last year. I saw it projected at a theater with the intermission and everything. It was just so awesome, and I loved that it’s “introducing” Peter O’Toole. The character’s so complex and interesting and perverse and heroic and everything in a huge movie and it’s never going to happen again to have a character in front of a movie that’s that big, that’s that complicated. The scene where he’s getting, like, whatever is happening to him… It’s wild. I love that movie."

"Medium Cool. I’m crazy about that film. To me, there are a lot of great films from that era because I was seeing them in our movie house when I was a kid [Luhrmann’s dad ran a theater for a period], but what I love about Medium Cool is that it preempts the idea of taking a real historical event and weaving a drama around it. So that’s great about it. Robert Forster is great in that picture. Not to mention — and I’ll be a bit flippant here — the clothes are fantastic. It’s just a great pop cultural picture."

"This is definitely on my list of the greatest movies ever. I saw it in the theater and it was the first time I actually experienced hypnosis in cinema—a conscious hypnosis. It’s one of the mysteries of filmmaking for me—why does it work, and how does it work?—but to be honest I don’t want to look into it because I want it to stay a mystery. If I were running the Library of Congress I would make a 70 mm copy of this and put it in a nuclear shelter, just in case."

"The Year of Living Dangerously. We had that VHS. I saw it the first time, actually, when it came out in the theater. It had Mel Gibson in it, so I thought it was gonna be an action movie. I was really disappointed. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And I got the VHS and I started watching it. There’s something about Linda Hunt’s performance, you know? “What then must we do?” Travel and mysticism and romance is at the heart of that movie. And there are images in that movie that will stay with you your whole life."

"One more. Let’s go with Clint Eastwood’s movie Unforgiven. I think that’s a brilliant movie. The acting in it is totally brilliant. I’ve always been a big Gene Hackman fan, but who isn’t? I love Eastwood and Morgan Freeman in it. Richard Harris is hilarious. I think the movie has an unbelievable sense of myth, and a great sense of undoing that myth. I’ve never been in a movie theater where I had that experience where the end of the movie, you have the hero say, “Yeah, I’ve killed women and children. I’m gonna kill you.”"

"I saw this one on the evening of its release in New York City. The advance buzz spread fears that it would ignite racial friction and incite race riots. The tension in the audience before it began was nothing I had ever experienced before in a movie house. The melting pot of moviegoers sat in stillness and silence and finally stood up and applauded the screen as the end credits rolled. We walked out of the theater transformed, more united, tolerant, and together than we were two hours before. How many films have ever been able to do that?"

"In regard to acting, I have to mention Secret Sunshine. It has a performance by Jeon Do-yeon that must be one of the most shockingly truthful, harrowing—unbearable, really—performances in the history of film. When I walked out of the theater, I wondered out loud to my wife Cindy if performances like that shouldn’t perhaps be against the law. So naked. Too naked? I will never forget it, and anyone reading this should watch the film. If you can bear to witness such depth of feeling. And it isn’t just acting. It’s the truth."

"This is not only one of the funniest films ever made, but, as one who has spent time with a number of painters, I could see that it was really about painters and painting. And it was responsible for my first film—a short that ran for almost a year at the Paris Theater in New York. Of course, I’ll always love it. One of the lines I love is when the helper lady asks how you can tell when a picture is finished, and the painter hero looks at her quizzically and says, “You just know.” For me, that was movies."