"I love this picture because it showed me at a very young age the scope an animated movie could have. It also inspired me to look deeper into this genre and the different filmmakers working in it. I loved the graphic novels and it was the first time I saw a comic book translated to the big screen. It unspooled at a second run by my house and I saw it a TON of times. I also believe this is why I own a red Japanese motorcycle that goes really really fast. AKIRA HUUUUH?!"

"I think I was graduating from college, yeah. It was just so fresh and amazing, and the storytelling, you know, changed cinema forever. I just loved it. And it brought back John Travolta. Every character was incredible, and I loved its really dark sense of humor. Like, literally some of the hardest laughing I’ve ever done in my life was when John Travolta accidentally blows the head off that guy. [laughs] Making that funny is such a feat. The comic sensibility of Quentin Tarantino never ceases to amaze me."

"In Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ in the ’70s, the military government had thousands of activists and political opponents ‘disappeared.’ This novel is about a mother and father dealing with the disappearance of their son. It’s a moving book that also has a lot of dark comedy in it. For instance, the parents accept free nose jobs in exchange for a debt. It also captures the comic absurdity of the bureaucracy of a dictatorship. What’s most interesting to me is, as one character makes clear, the truth tellers in life are so often written off as crazy."

"I’m going to choose Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr. It was either Steamboat Bill Jr. or The General. You know, let me change it to The General. Love the train. Anyways, Steamboat Bill Jr.-slash-The General. It’s about Buster Keaton. He was one of the great inspirations in my career, my life, in studying his works. He’s like a human cartoon character. But, more importantly, he developed character and personality. These films are so appealing because of the personality of the characters he created. His comic timing is staggering."

"When I was a teen, like for many of my generation, Monty Python were my comic heroes. But as brilliantly directed as the Python films are (look close at Monty Python and the Holy Grail—there are a lot of incredibly shot sequences), nothing prepared my for the amazing mix of humor, heart, and insane inventiveness that Terry Gilliam brought to his solo work. These two titles are films I bring up constantly in meetings in Hollywood—which usually leads to me being asked to leave. But I don’t care."

"When I was a teen, like for many of my generation, Monty Python were my comic heroes. But as brilliantly directed as the Python films are (look close at Monty Python and the Holy Grail—there are a lot of incredibly shot sequences), nothing prepared my for the amazing mix of humor, heart, and insane inventiveness that Terry Gilliam brought to his solo work. These two titles are films I bring up constantly in meetings in Hollywood—which usually leads to me being asked to leave. But I don’t care."