"It seems I’ve been watching Children of Paradise all my life. I remember taking my son to see it when he was seven. When I was trying to convince Brando to play Garrett in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, he told me that, along with the master swordsman in Seven Samurai, the thief in Children of Paradise was the greatest performance on film. I came to Port of Shadows much later in my life, and the Criterion transfer really enhanced its beauty. Jean Gabin became a prototype for me of a kind of actor difficult to find today. And the dialogue inspired me to attempt to re-create its poetic realism."

"Breathless is a film very much about passion and life lived solely by the fuel of passion, which is very French. I like the pacing of it, and I like that the lead actress is an American speaking French. It was nice to hear a character speaking French who still has an American accent. Generally it’s an American actor trying to do a French accent as though they were a French person speaking English, which is ridiculous. So it was kind of nice to see and hear this terrible French accent, which is only because she’s not a native speaker. The remaster is stunning—it looks so good on Blu-ray. It looks almost like it’s a modern film."

"In a year filled with epochal films—Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, the great In a Lonely Place—this 1950 noir may have secretly had the greatest impact. Every heist film or let’s-get-a-team-together caper of the last seventy years owes a huge debt to Huston’s twisting and intense thriller, whose delightful ensemble cast features a bright-eyed Marilyn Monroe (then just about to take over Hollywood) and a grizzled Sterling Hayden (who was already looking to leave the industry altogether). The final moment is a genuine heartbreaker—as is the documentary about Hayden on the Criterion edition, which finds the great actor living on a boat, seemingly set adrift from society."

"I know everyone’s expecting me to list off all these action movies, but Stand By Me. There’s something about the relationships and the performances in that movie that I found really inspirational. And this is before I was even considering being an actor. I just found it to be one of the more true, real, honest sort of movies that really had an effect on me. I watched it a week ago and got goose bumps. Especially with the whole River Phoenix thing and how he disappears at the end. How genius is he in the movie? There’s something about a movie like that that can be so effective with no gimmicks."