"I sat next to someone called Arnaud Desplechin at a dinner once in Paris. At home a week later, I saw a movie called A Christmas Tale. It was jaw-dropping, immediately one of the best films I’d ever seen. I got up from the couch thinking, Who in God’s name directed this thing? At the TV, I flipped over the DVD case and shrieked. I’d been sitting right next to him and hadn’t said a thing. I was distraught—like someone who decides not to buy an eight-dollar painting at a thrift shop only to find out later that it was a Picasso. Surely A Christmas Tale is built on one of our sturdiest clichés, that of a dysfunctional family reuniting for the holidays. But that’s where everything you’ve ever seen before ends. There’s not a filmic technique that isn’t employed to its fullest, no trick Desplechin is afraid to pull. Every beat is specific, there’s not a written false note, and it has some of the ballsiest acting on any side of the Atlantic. I only wish I had known all this when I was sitting next to the man. C’est la vie."

"I feel like at one point or another, this is everyone’s favorite movie. Danny Elfman is amazing. I’m a big fan of stop motion. I really have an admiration and appreciation for [it]. I think they do such an amazing job, and they take so long to make. It’s almost flawless. You can’t even tell that they’re fake toys. It looks like animation. I like the music; it was amazing. Danny Elfman always does it with his scores, and Tim Burton is really rad. It’s done so well for the time. That’s a movie that will come around every so often that will just hang in the air and will never — no matter how good the graphics get, or how good your TV gets — at the end of the day, it will never folly. There are some things you’ll put on and go “It looked like that?” But when you watch Nightmare Before Christmas, you know it never gets bad or old. The music is always amazing, and they worked really hard. And that rings through. Stop motion is so great."

"Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Again, very fantastical, very transporting and mysterious, and Jean Marais’ performance as the beast is wonderful. I wanted to have that sound to my voice when I did Moonstruck, and then Norman Jewison got very upset with me and lost his patience with it and almost fired from the movie. He called me on Christmas Eve to tell me that the dailies weren’t working, because he said, “You gotta drop the Jean Marais. I don’t want you sounding like [inaudible] talk like that in the character,” but the irony is that John Patrick Shanley told me that when he originally wrote Moonstruck the title was The Wolf and the Bride, so I thought there was some connection there."