"""Alright, I’d say the first would have to be Goodfellas. I know that’s probably one you get a lot, but I remember it came out, and I was probably in about the 8th grade. Me and my buddy Dougie Thornel probably saw that at the theaters 30 times. I mean we would just go, and we would watch it, and then sit in the theater and watch it again. I can’t say enough good about it. It’s horrifying, it’s hilarious, it’s so unbelievably honest. Look, I mean, Scorsese is my favorite filmmaker. You know, the fact that I got the chance to work with him [on The Wolf of Wall Street] was sort of the mountaintop, the kind of crowning achievement of my career, and I don’t mean that in sort of how I’m perceived by the world. I just mean in terms of experience. My brief time on that movie really changed the way that I work as an actor. He’s one of these guys that makes you feel that anything is possible. I’ve studied in the Russian theater, and one of the main ways that we study was you get a scene and then you do a big improvisation about the scene and what the scene could be. That’s precisely how he worked. Each one of these scenes, you create this unbelievably vivid reality, you really take yourself to the place, and everybody feels like they are one hundred feet tall. It doesn’t matter whether you are background or whether you are craft services or anything, but everybody is so full of ideas. You make it on the day, and then he just sort of takes what he wants from that. I feel like that method of filmmaking that’s so Scorsese, so uniquely his, shines brightest in that movie. That sense of anything can happen at anytime, it’s happening right there in the moment. I think it really, really just shines brightest in that film, and that’s why it’s my favorite film."""

"I think the greatest film of all time. It doesn’t even care about anything. It has the best MacGuffin. The audiences in the west — if you’re going to transfer somebody from one place to the other, you want to spend all the money on the big gadgets that do all of the — as Monty Python says “the machines that go BING” kind of stuff. Whereas in La Jetée, just two guys lie down on a hammock, they drug intravenously, and they go, “Voila! We’re in the future.” I just love that. It’s just a Macguffin in a different culture, the different time — they’re used to different things. And for me, having traveled a lot, I always have to find out — when you show a movie to people they just say, “Would you buy this?” That’s one of the reasons you have origin films — like Superman or whatever — that takes so long in the west whenever you start to originate one, because you have to set up that this guy can fly because he is from another planet, has a nemesis, you can make him grounded when you give him kryptonite, and all that stuff. You watch a Hindi movie, and they just say, “Hey this guy can deflect a bullet with his ring because he is [Indian film actor] Amitabh Bachchan, so next question.” Literally, it is all about what each culture takes — to take as a MacGuffin and where they want the money spent. And La Jetée just doesn’t care. It’s got the greatest story and the movie — the images don’t even move except in one particular instance — I don’t want to spoil it for someone who hasn’t seen it. But it is just one of the greatest. It was made the year I was born, I was obsessed with it forever and when Terry Gilliam made 12 Monkeys I knew it was done."

"All this talk about bonus features has made me think we need to talk about extras! I apologize, but I’m gonna deep-dive for a sec. It’s just that the special features are such key ingredients to some of these amazing Criterion titles and have become such an essential part of my own viewing experiences. There are stunning extras in the Criterion Collection that I often think about as important additions to the history of movies. So don’t get me started, or I’m going to start blabbing about the piles of amazing extras on Barry Lyndon (which fill two Blu-rays!). Or the amazing documentaries on 8½ and Seven Samurai and Brazil. Or The Game, with its eight different audio commentaries. Or that concert film in the edition of Inside Llewyn Davis. Or every Andrea Arnold short film on Fish Tank. Or that Cronos supplement where Guillermo del Toro gives a nerdgasm tour of his bonkers house. (I told you: don’t get me started.) But I think my all-time favorite bonus feature is Charles Laughton Directs “The Night of the Hunter,” a two-and-a-half-hour documentary that has to go down as one of the most interesting behind-the-scenes films ever made. I had never even heard of this until I picked up the Night of the Hunter disc. It literally shows something that I’ve never seen before: tons of footage of a director in the midst of working with his actors during takes. While actors are performing, you hear Charles Laughton (a legendary actor directing his only film) guiding the cast through every line in basically every shot, take after take after take. It’s like being on set next to a perfectionist director while he meticulously sculpts the performances in his masterpiece. (And oh, poor Shelley Winters. “Do it again! Do it again! Less air in between! Go ahead Mitch! Look at her! Shelley, look up now and say ‘blessss ussss all.’ Yes, that’s it, Shelley!!”)"

"Second I would say came out roughly around the same time but probably, The Silence of the Lambs. I just loved that movie. That too, me and my buddy Dougie Thornel… We actually were too young to get into that movie, but I remember one time we weren’t allowed in and then we snuck in anyway, and again, it was one where we went back and back and back. I think Ted Levine’s performance as Buffalo Bill is one of the most haunting performances that has ever happened on film. He’s an actor that I admire so deeply and I really love… Especially in the last few years, I’ve gotten to take these parts that are only in a few scenes and really create as rich a back story and history for the character as possible, and I thought he did that so cogently and so beautifully in that movie. Its not just that there are so many quotable lines, but you really see the depths of the torture that’s going through him. It’s such a meditation on serial killing and psychotic murderers, and I love the fact that Hannibal Lecter — obviously one of the great characters of all time — but I just love the fact that you don’t know whether to root for him or against him. I think it’s the ultimate anti-hero character, and the fact that they were able to achieve him being able to… you know, at the end of the movie, you’re actually rooting for him, that he got out and that he’s going to go eat people. I think that’s just so f—ing awesome. And obviously the scene with Levine and Jodie Foster with the night vision. It’s a book that I loved and I think its one of those rare times where I think the movie totally even outshines the book. Wow, what a film. It will always be one of my favorites."

"A perfectly executed movie; flawlessly executed. Incredible movie. And the thing — haha — the aspect of it that I like the best, is that I love the ending. I absolutely adore and love the ending, where you’re left ambiguously hanging and wondering what’s gonna happen. Kurt Russell is so underrated as an actor; he’s such a great anchor in every movie. I love him in just about everything he does. I remember one of my fondest memories of shooting Gremlins. I’ve never really talked about this. Right next door to Gremlins was the movie that Kurt Russell met Goldie Hawn on, a movie called Swing Shift. Their trailers were right next to us, so we were on Stage 16, and Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn were on stage 15, and we were literally 20 feet away from each other. You would exit the stages and walk towards the commissary and you’d have to walk past them. We’d have frequent breaks from Gremlins because the special effects would snap sometimes and there would be fixes that were needed and whatnot, so I would go outside and get some sunshine because it’s LA and it’s beautiful. So I’d go outside and sit on the steps and play with my Calico football or whatever game thing I had, and because I loved Kurt Russell already from The Thing and I loved Goldie Hawn, I was this interloper. Somehow I’ve managed to star in a movie — I don’t know how I did it — and I would watch Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn and their relationship unfold. I’d see them chatting a little the first couple of weeks, and the next couple of weeks they would go to the commissary together. A few weeks after that, they’d walk to the commissary a little slower holding hands. I thought even then, “That’s some chemistry right there.” And they’re still together. You’d see bits and pieces everyday, and if you had any inkling about how to read body language, it was pretty self-evident."

"This is a comedy for you movie nerds (but that’s probably why you’re on Rotten Tomatoes anyway, because you are a film nerd). This movie is called American Movie, and it’s a documentary comedy. Man, oh man, I remember seeing this film with Horatio Sanz: we were in the theater, and we were crying so hard from laughing, we were hugging each other and punching each other because we were laughing too hard. It’s about a man trying to make a horror movie. He calls it Cove–en, and it’s about a coven, but he doesn’t like the way “coven” rhymes with “oven,” that doesn’t make sense, so he calls it, mispronounces the title for his film, and calls it Cove-en. He tries to get his dad to act in the movie, and his dad is going like, “You have something to live for. Jesus told me so.” And he’s like, “All right, Dad, do it again, but your teeth are falling out.” And he goes, “Cole, you have something to live for. Jesus told me so.” And he goes, “Geez, I hear his teeth clickety clacking in the audio, it’s unusable.” I mean it is crying funny. He takes a dentist, a local dentist [who] wants to be an actor, and he’s ramming his head into a closet that he was supposed to have scored so that it easily breaks away, but he forgets to score the wood so he’s actually ramming a human’s head into a wooden cabinet. [The man] is screaming, and he’s ramming this poor man’s head into the thing. So cut, and the guy’s holding his head. He’s like, “Oh, my gosh.” He’s like “Uh, man, I’m sorry, I forgot to cut that board.” It’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. It will make you cry laughing. If you love filmmaking, you will appreciate this. The two guys, the two stars of the movie, are true stars."