"Now we’ll start with the Paul Newman ones. The three Paul Newman ones. I guess I’ll start with Cool Hand Luke. I think it’s the first time I ever started to recognize metaphor. Or I guess allegory, because it’s a bit of a Christ allegory, I think. After he eats those 50 eggs and he’s laid out on that table it’s the same way that he’s laid out at the end after he’s shot. His legs are crossed, and his arms are out. I didn’t know when I first saw that film that that’s what was going on, or I didn’t know how that affected the rest of the story, but I recognized it, I know that. Because Cool Hand Luke is a strange film where I grew up with it on TV every weekend. It was just one of those films that always played on cable on the weekends growing up. It’s just always there, so you never really consider it. My dad loves that film. Then you go back and sit and watch it when you’re older and you realize that in the background of your life there was this amazing piece of artwork playing. Obviously its depiction of the south and the character behavior in it is just so rich and the cast amazing. Also I’m really drawn to this idea of a square peg in a round hole. That’s what Cool Hand Luke was. Luke was this guy, he wasn’t a bad person but he just didn’t fit in the world around him and he was persecuted as a result. Yeah, he was responsible, he was cutting the heads off parking meters. He was always culpable in the things that he did. But it was more a result that he probably just never belonged anywhere and he was restless as a result, unsettled. What that says to me: it’s not like that’s the way I felt in my life — quite the opposite actually. What I recognized in that is that is an archetype of a man, that person exists. To be able to take a personality type like that and make it so realistic, make it not cliché, make it not generic, but at the same time represent this type of person — I’m really impressed by that. It’s kind of what you strive for in ultimate storytelling in my mind. Both specificity and universality all at the same time."

"Ok, I know this one’s cheating. I don’t care. So it’s not a movie, so what? It did start as a movie, so it totally counts. No TV show has meant more to me than Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Stop laughing, I’m serious. It’s one of the greatest things ever created in the history of mankind. I said stop. How dare you?! I will fight you! I will fight you and I will win. It’s the best. Every right-thinking person knows that. When Buffy was on the air, I recorded every single episode on my TiVo. I’m pretty sure my DVR thought I was a fourteen year-old girl. Whatever. The show was incredible. It refused to be pigeonholed. It defied, merged, bent, and blended genres, masterfully commingling fantasy and reality. It dealt with issues of real substance. It treated its audience intelligently, with the utmost respect. Over a decade after it went off the air, it still had residence in my head and heart, and served as a model for what Kubo became: real life wrapped in metaphor. Like Buffy, we explore triumph and tragedy, loss and healing, and compassion, and forgiveness through the stylized prism of fantasy. We acknowledge that part of life… is death. That lives can be thrown away and lost and upended in an unfair and random act of casual violence, without the grandeur and rousing speechifying often found in heroic movie deaths. People we love are often ripped away from us, in an instant. And we need to find a way to reconcile that a part of life is struggle, and it has a cost. Kubo and the Two Strings, like life, like Buffy, is wonderfully bittersweet. So thank you, Joss Whedon, for giving me so much high-spirited joy and gut-wrenching heartache. You saved the world. A lot."