"A lot of people didn’t like it, but I loved Steven Soderbergh’s remake of the Russian film Solaris from the minute I saw it. I like it more than the original. I never paid too much attention to soundtrack music before that, but as soon as I heard that one in the theater I was just like, “What the fuck is this?” If you looked at my iTunes playlist, this soundtrack might be the most played album on my computer. It’s like experimental ambient music that still really involves your emotions. You could draw a line from this soundtrack to “The Ghost of You Lingers” from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, which came out around this time."

"When I was a kid I saw My Name Is Joe in the theater. I’d never seen anybody act like Peter Mullan before and I’d never seen a movie like that, period. Watching Mullan in that movie I was just like, how do you do that? How do you get actors to do that? After that I watched every Ken Loach movie I could. Kes is one of my favorite movies ever. The plot of We the Animals is very smiliar to Kes; we follow the same formula. In fact, the entire last third of our movie is completely ripped off from the end of Kes and follows almost beat by beat the storytelling of that film."

"I’ve seen this movie more times than I can count. I think it’s the best movie about being a kid ever made. It’s a fairy tale and a nightmare and a totally believable portrayal of a Swedish family in Uppsala at the turn of the twentieth century, all at the same time. It has always reminded me of one of my favorite novels, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. It’s also a movie about the weird magic of theater . . . Both the opening sequence and the reading from Strindberg at the end kill me. And the way Bergman shoots inanimate objects . . . The statues and the toy angels and the clocks and the puppets and the lamps . . . They’re all watching Alexander, the whole movie."

"Next, I would go Old School. Again, I think I was in high school when that came out, early in high school, and it was just one of those movies that I remember… I still very vividly remember the theater I was in and where I was sitting and who I was with, and I remember going back to see it in theaters, like, two more times, and then watching it over and over and over. Just one of those movies that I have memorized from front to back. Obviously being a huge Will Ferrell fan, and have now got a chance to meet him and work with him too, so it’s been pretty awesome."

"I was a student at N.Y.U. in the ’90s. It was the first semester of a musical theater class, and one of the students got up and sang “Every Day a Little Death.” It was dark outside and snowing, and I remember hearing the song and thinking, “What is this?” It’s such a simple series of tiny moments that make up a day, that seem to be completely pragmatic descriptions of everyday life, played against the unbelievable torrent of sweeping emotion underneath in the music. And that is such a classic skill of Steve’s, where lyric plays against music, and the two things together, in the ear of the listener, tell you the whole story."

"A total favorite from when I was a kid was My Bodyguard. When they’re riding together on the motorcycle it’s like one of my favorite images in a movie. I think I also like the story. That type of story has always really appealed to me, two outsiders coming together like that, basically united as a cause who are from opposite sides of the tracks. That movie is just so awesome. The two of them on the motorcycle in that one really… It’s just that image, that feeling. I watched it at the perfect time in my life. I watched it when it came out in the theater. It was very meaningful to me growing up."

"Well I guess my first one has to be Withnail and I, the 1987 Bruce Robinson classic. You know, the plot is one that would get you laughed out of any Hollywood studio: Two unemployed actors go on a holiday, drinking, to one of their uncle’s cottages for the weekend; but it’s one of the most deeply rich, brilliant, tragicomic tales of male friendship. I actually remember seeing it when I was a kid, and walking out of the theater in London — and by the way, it did not do well at the time it was released; it was a tiny little film — but I remember thinking that I wanted to become a filmmaker after that."