"What touched me about that was the friendship. In a very weird sort of way there are some similarities between my films — probably pretty-much The Firm — and Midnight Cowboy, only inasmuch as it’s a hard world but soft characters. There’s something about that friendship with two people that transcends where the film’s set. I have friendships where you’re like two old women, nagging away at each other, and you kind of hate each other in a lot of ways but you’re inextricably embroiled with one another. That’s what true friendship is, you know. There’s such a tragedy about Midnight Cowboy as well and there’s such an amazing smell of New York in the 70s. It’s one of the few films where it transports you there and you can feel the environment."

"Jaws, because I just showed it to my kids for the first time. They’d seen snippets, but that’s the first time I said, “Okay, you guys are old enough. Gotta bite the bullet; we’re going to watch the damn thing all together.” My son, my ten-year-old, was like… So I watched it when I was seven because it was released on my birthday in 1975. June 20th, 1975, Jaws came out, and that was my birthday present. He was like — with the sheets — doing this [mimics pulling covers over head] over his head, and I was like, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m practicing to make sure they go up high enough.” [laughs] So we watched that. They loved that, and they were like, “What else can we watch?”

“This book scared the shit out of me. I picked it up after watching the film adaptation by Tarkovsky, which is one of my favourite movies. Sometimes I feel like the only explanation for human life is that our planet is a terrible god. I like thinking that planets are living, sentient behemoths that we completely misunderstand. I’m horrified to think what it would be like if such an abstract sentience had no regard for us, or enjoying toying with us. The act of repeatedly killing a doppelganger or a loved one seems so horrific; how could anyone think of something so awful? Whenever people pour cream into coffee in a clear glass, it reminds me of this book, because that’s what I imagine the surface of Solaris to look like.”