"I’ve always been fascinated by the film Welcome to the Dollhouse, the Todd Solondz film. It’s a really dark comedy. It might be because I grew up in Long Island and it feels like where I grew up. A lot of the strangeness of it feels familiar to me. I love the look of it. I love the tone of it. When we started working on Freaks and Geeks, I thought a lot about Welcome to the Dollhouse, in terms of how it was lit, the production design, the strange cadences of its comedy, and these kids who feel like they’re in hell, their families and how their parents treat them. She (Heather Matarazzo) and that character (Dawn Wiener) is one of the greatest outcast nerd characters ever created in film or television. So it’s for someone who always loves a great underdog story. That’s one of my favorites and not a movie that makes it a triumphant fantasy for the nerdy girl either. That is never the Todd Solondz way. I thought about it when we did Freaks and Geeks because we often thought, “This movie is about how you handle failure. It’s not about succeeding. It’s not a show about wish fulfillment.” You see that in a lot of Todd Solondz work. I don’t think we had half the balls that he has."

"This is actually kind of a curve ball, ’cause I don’t generally like movies that are this dark, but I’m a huge fan of the Todd Solondz film Happiness. That movie’s so f**ked up, but it’s so… I actually really enjoy that movie. That movie is so deeply disturbing but there’s something exuberant and hilarious about it. The laughs are so uncomfortable. That movie just really works for me and I don’t generally like movies where the vision of humanity is that dark and unforgiving."

"We’re back to opera, we haven’t left it — because Magnolia. If you think about the moment Keanu wakes up as a battery, the moment Lana Turner loses it in traffic and is in this insane hysteria of flashing lights that is completely unrealistic, and then you look at the moment where it’s raining frogs. I saw it, and was like, “Is this going to be one of those movies that I don’t like where he looks down on every one?” I think Alexander Payne and Todd Solondz are super talented, but sometimes I don’t want to sit through their movies because the bile is just unbearable. I didn’t really know PT Anderson’s work that well, or what was going to happen. And then, it turns out he loves people so hard that it rains frogs. There is actual opera in this one. Oh, and BT-dubs, there is a musical number. The license and the observation and the amount that he went for it. The craft and his ability to sustain that much — any one of these movies could have fallen into a puddle of pretension, but the mastery behind them meant that they never could. Jason Robards, who happens to be in two of the movies on this list, him actually dying of actual cancer playing a guy dying of cancer, giving that speech. And Tom Cruise giving the best performance he’ll ever give. It just felt so achingly, weirdly logical to me."