"I wish young actors and actresses were better versed in the work of Fields, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and even lower-brow comics like the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, Jerry Lewis. Actors can partly cultivate a sense of humor from observing and mimicking our forebears. W. C. Fields makes me laugh more than any other film actor. His performances seem effortless, as if Fields is just doing Fields, but he deserves more credit than that. He constructed and honed his character over a twenty-year stage career. That character, known in The Bank Dick as Egbert Sousé, is the cinematic progenitor of a comic archetype: the lazy, drunken misanthrope. Fields wasn’t the innovator that Chaplin or Keaton was, of course, and in fact, his movies are not great. They’re flimsy vehicles for his routines. But I’ve also come to believe that’s part of the joke. “Can you believe they made a whole movie about this guy?” The Bank Dick also features several great comic character actors, such as Franklin Pangborn, Grady Sutton (as Og Oggilby), and Shemp Howard. I wanted to put Contempt on my list but Godard never put Shemp in a movie, know what I’m saying?"

"I saw Ashes and Diamonds for the first time in 1961. And even back then, during that period when we expected to be astonished at the movies, when things were happening all over the world, it shocked me. It had to do with the look, both immediate and haunted, like a nightmare that won’t stop unfolding; the sense of maddening insanity and absurdity, the tragedy of political infighting on the brink of peace and coming of age during wartime; and the beauty of the lead actor, Zbigniew Cybulski. The film has the power of a hallucination: I can close my eyes and certain images will flash back to me with the force they had when I saw them for the first time over fifty years ago. I’ve crossed paths with Andrzej Wajda a few times over the years, and I’ve always been in awe of his energy and his unflinching vision. I saw him again a couple of years ago, a little frailer but still as burning with energy as he’d been back in the ’90s, and he was preparing to make another film, now just completed, about Lech Walesa (the final installment of the trilogy that began with Man of Marble and Man of Iron). He’s a model to all filmmakers."

"I’m also a big fan of comedy as well, so even things to this day like Bridget Jones’s Diary, there was just something about Bridget Jones that I thought … And I guess it’s [Renée Zellweger‘s] performance. I remember there was a lot of talk about the fact that they cast an American in that role, but I think she captured the sensibility of a repressed English girl who was desperate to fall in love so beautifully And as an actor myself, often you caught slack if you’re playing a gay person and you’re not really gay, or you’re playing an American and you’re not really American, or you’re playing whatever it happens to be. I just think if you can find the essence in a character and pull it off, then it doesn’t matter where you’re from or what your nationality is, etc. There’s something to me about that film that’s like the perfect romantic comedy. I just think it’s a bit hard to put my finger on what it is, to be honest. It’s just beautifully executed. Everything’s so well balanced. Often whenever I read a romantic comedy now, I’m comparing it to Bridget Jones and if it’s planned well."

"Close Up by Abbas Kiarostami. The way that that film blends fiction and reality, it is a north star for me. He made a movie about a contemporary Iranian filmmaker named Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and he read an article in the paper about a person who went around pretending to be this filmmaker in order to scam a family out of money and resources. And he went and cast the guy who was going around pretending to be Makhmalbaf, and he cast the real family that he scammed. And he recreated each scenario as if it was a script. He used real life as a script, and you’re watching the real players re-enact something that happened recently in their life, and the result is magical. The result is something that only film can give you. It makes you question your own self. It makes you question, what is a personality? It makes you question empathy. Because you start to actually see that this guy is actually a great actor, the main guy. And then you have one of the most complicated moments in all movies, when Makhmalbaf himself picks up the guy from the prison and rides on a motorcycle through Tehran. Masterpiece"

"My favorite of all Fellini’s films, it seems his most perfect and certainly his most likable and affecting. And it’s his most comical, thanks to the wonderful performances of Leopoldo Trieste and, especially, Alberto Sordi, who went on to star in over three hundred films in Italy and is rightly regarded as their greatest actor. Its story also prefigures the theme of three of his later films (La dolce vita, Toby Dammit, and Ginger and Fred), as to the corrosive effect of the new media religion of celebrity. In 1950, the inroads of paganism on Christianity still seemed only foolish when a photo¬-comic-book character almost destroys a Catholic marriage. But already by 1959, the lust for media attention had become all consuming and malignant in La dolce vita, where a journalist goes from one idiotic media event to another, including an imagined miracle in the rain. In Toby Dammit, on a nightmarish TV talk show, the church itself parades in front of the TV cameras; and in Ginger and Fred, about another ridiculous TV celebrity program, it has all become totally absurd, only momentarily relieved by a nostalgia for older performers. Half a century later, the celebrity media religion rules, and there is no end to its reign in sight."