"Strangelove — you can watch it again and again. Brilliant. To me, maybe the funniest movie ever made. Huge variety in the styles of the movie. Some of it’s shot like cinéma vérité documentary. Some of it’s very stylized. The mise en scène changes radically. When you’re in the bomber it’s hand-held — it might as well be Richie Leacock, or one of the Pennebakers making a movie; that’s how free-form it is. Totally realistic, even though you have Slim Pickens as the pilot of the jet that’s taking the atomic bomb to Russia. He’s hilarious, and yet you have a sense of this is really what it looks like — what their equipment looks like, what the gauges and the codes look like. They do a really funny sequence where they open up their survival box and there’s a condom, and there’s a 45, and it’s totally believable. And of course it ends with Slim Pickens riding the atomic bomb down like a wild horse toward Russia, and the world ending. And Sterling Hayden, absolutely hilarious throughout the movie, and Sellers playing five parts, I think. The scenes between him and Sterling Hayden, where he’s the British officer who’s been assigned to this airbase and Sterling Hayden is completely wacko and is convinced that they’re stealing his precious bodily fluids, because when he had sex he felt depleted. [Laughs]."

"Then, my last one is going to be — this might be slightly more obscure, though it really shouldn’t be. I fell in love with this film when I first saw it and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film as beautiful, as contemplative. The film After Life by Hirokazu Koreeda. I remember when I first saw it, just being totally blown away by every single frame of it. The honesty of it, the fact that it celebrated life, the fact that it was so unbelievably profound and spoke volumes about living life to the fullest and cherishing every moment. I don’t think there’s been a more beautiful film about life itself. It’s so understated in the way he tells his story. It’s obviously a collection of vignettes and a collection of talking heads, but woven into this narrative. Again, I might be wrong, but I seem to remember that the number of the people who contributed to the experiences of life are real people — it’s almost like documentary-styled elements to the film itself. So you got these really personal memories that are very private. Sometimes they’re nostalgic, sometimes they are beautiful, sometimes they’re funny and amusing. That, for me, is the ultimate win. When the Blu-rays of that came out in Japan, straight away I was like, “I’m buying this film! I need this film in HD.”"

"In Gleaners And I, what’s around you is what you survive on – it’s a kind of contemporary foraging that they’re doing. I thought of that, and Agnes [Varda, the director] was on my mind because, A) she passed away when I was making a film, and B) they brought back a print of Vagabond before I was shooting. I was in New York and I saw Lady Bird and the theater was packed and there was so much hype about Lady Bird at that time. Then I walked up and I saw Vagabond in this not-so-full theater and saw a print of it. I thought, “Oh my God, the inventiveness of that film and the sort of circular motion of it and how she just decides to let people talk to the camera at a point, even though she’s in this narrative!” Anyway, just her confidence to be so inventive with narrative form. She’s so inspiring. How she moved in and out of documentary and narrative and how her docs have such narrative threads in them and her narratives… she just opens the door, and it’s like, “OK, now you’re going to talk to these real people that aren’t actors,” and she is just very fluid between those two. I admire those things about her work so much."