"My family, we only watch scary movies together. We do not watch comedy – anything – we just watch scary movies. The only other times that I have seen scary movies is when I’m watching Netflix in my room. And I think I’ve probably watched The Conjuring 100 times. I’m not exaggerating: I’ve watched The Conjuring a hundred times. I could recite the movie. A lot of scary movies usually just [feature] a bunch of pop-ups, which is pretty scary, but I don’t really think it’s that scary – it catches you off guard and you’re just shocked. But with The Conjuring it’s actually creepy stuff. And they have a lot of things that I have phobias of. It all piles up. It’s not just like, “Ooh that was scary for a second!” It’s like “Oh my God, that’s so scary!” and then it keeps adding on. It’s not a pop-up and then in another 20 minutes it’s going to be another pop-up. It’s: “Why is she still walking towards me? And why is it still getting more intense?”"

"It’s going to be a draw between Godfather II and Manhattan. Obviously, there’s no point in seeing Godfather II without seeing The Godfather, but Godfather II is the only sequel I like. It’s just a spectacular character study and the scope of it, the humor of it, the sex appeal, the action, and the twist of the story and Fredo Corleone and Robert Deniro in the flashbacks — all of that is everything you ever want when you watch a movie. Manhattan I saw in the 1970s as a teenager. Woody Allen was pretty important in my house. My parents are both New York Jews and Manhattan is just an incredibly beautiful movie with a deep expression of humor and existentialism together. It now seems more morally complex to me than I realized, but I just loved things in it like the camera being locked off and people walking in and out of the frame. I noticed that even as a kid and tried to bend my head around the corners."

"This was what my sister was listening to in her room and when I heard it there was a defining moment. We all have these pivotal moments where there’s a sense of clarity where we can recall what we were seeing at the time, we can remember what things smelled like and their color and I remember walking through the hallway of our house and hearing ‘Heartbreaker’ coming out of her room and the world stopped. I was stunned because it struck such a nerve and had so much energy. Then when the solo came on I discovered another dimension of music. I was probably ten or eleven. I hadn’t picked up a guitar by this point but that’s when I knew I had to play. I had seen guitars since I was in kindergarten and was obsessed by finding photos of guitars but after hearing Led Zeppelin II I crossed the line between just liking guitars and wishing I could play one, to saying, ‘Ok, I’m going to play…’"

"I’ve said and written so much about this picture over the years; for me it’s always been one of the very greatest ever made, and every time I go back to look at it—about once a year—it’s new: it reveals another side, another level, and it goes deeper. What is it that’s so special about The Red Shoes? Of course, it’s beautiful, one of the most beautiful Technicolor films ever made; it has such an extraordinary sense of magic—look again at the scene where Moira Shearer is walking up the steps to Anton Walbrook’s villa, especially in the new restoration: it seems like she’s floating on currents of sparkling light and air. And there’s no other picture that dramatizes and visualizes the overwhelming obsession of art, the way it can take over your life. But on a deeper level, in the movement and energy of the filmmaking itself, is a deep and abiding love of art, a belief in art as a genuinely transcendent state."