"Lastly, I am gonna have to say Black Panther. My favorite scene of Black Panther – it’s not really even a scene, but it’s towards the end when they’re at the United Nations, and just the image of Danai Gurira in that beautiful, black dress, that’s got that crazy neckline, and she just looks regal. And then, obviously, there’s the scene in the big battle, where a rhinoceros that comes towards Danai, and it stops right in its tracks, inches from her face. There’s just something. Oh, it’s so powerful, it’s so good, so good. And such a delectable moment. I can’t even tell you how much I loved that film."

"I’m not a big fan of action movies. I usually like dark movies, but that action movie was definitely one of my favorites. One of the top five. I love Tom Cruise, I love a lot of his films. And Emily Blunt, she played such a tight role. That movie is crazy. A lot of people actually try to make movies like that, where they re-live events until they correct it. It was almost like a movie that’s so insane that it can be realistic. I feel like, for some reason, I could put myself in those shoes. Like, “Whoa, this movie could be real,” you know what I mean?"

"Citizen Kane is, like you see now, P.T. Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood. It’s a good movie; it’s the same kind of thing. You follow a crazy character who gets really successful, and in a very bitter way. So I really love those two movies. It’s still one of the biggest crimes of Hollywood that they didn’t finance Orson Welles’ movies after a while. To have a genius like him, sitting there and trying to get his last 5,000 bucks together to make another movie after he did a movie like this… (Welles’ follow-up to Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, was notoriously completed and re-cut without his input.)"

"If anyone comes to my house in the country and has never seen this film, I always show it. So, in a way, I am emulating — in that action — exactly Auntie Mame. It is a joyous, crazy cartoon of a movie that has a little bit of everything, but at the heart is this woman we’d have all loved to have known and have taken us under her wing. I also love wall-to-wall speaking in film, and you sure get a lot of dialogue in this one. And who could resist a catch phrase like “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death”!"

"Then along those same lines, probably in the same conversations where my dad said, “You’re gonna watch Braveheart,” he said, “You’re gonna watch Gladiator.” I think it’s just maybe the crazy world setting. It is so big and far-fetched and out there, but the characters are just so real and intimate, and Russell [Crowe] is just so great in that movie. I think it’s the combination of those two things that was the first thing that stabs me. I remember just the image of the hand in the wheat and how beautiful it is. The whole movie’s really beautiful. Those shots are killer."

"Huge, magical, realist epic about Indian Independence through the eyes of a child born on the stroke of midnight. Funny, dense, flowery, the story goes on huge tangents, but I love this crazy novel, which somehow manages to depict and sum up the essence of the incredible vast country of India. A real education for me as someone who grew up in London, who had never been to India while growing up. This book helped me better understand what my parents had been through, where they came from before they chose to travel across the world to settle in the the U.K., where I was born."

"I’ll throw in my favorite documentary, which is Riding Giants. Any time it’s on, I stop what I’m doing and watch it because I’ve embraced the surfer lifestyle now. I’ve been in a 23 footer on Waimea and I was out there without a board. I had to and my wife thought I was crazy and my children were begging me not to go, but they were 23 feet that day on the North End. The Super Bowl was on and I didn’t care about the Super Bowl. I had to go out there when I got there just to do it. I’m an old frog man, you know?"