"My first memory was being in the movie theater — the strongest one up to this date, 60 or 48 years later. I still remember the shock of being transported into another dimension. Also, going through the gate of light like if I’d taken a huge dose of acid, like discovering other dimensions. But when you discover dimensions in a safe context as a movie theater, it looks even better. When I came out from that movie, I felt someone had injected me with something in the brain. I was obsessed with going to see the end of 2001. I liked the ape scenes, I like the beginning, but I just wanted to go again and again to see the movie, to go through the Stargate. And I’m happy, I met lately Douglas Trumbull [who did the visual effects on 2001], and we discussed Love, and he’s seen Enter the Void. For me, Douglas Trumbull was one of the very best partners in crime in this masterpiece, and just meeting him for me was just like discovering what was happening behind the curtain of the movie. This is the guy who like opened my mind when I was six years old."

"It’s the first movie I saw when I was a kid, and it’s also my first memory of my life. It’s the first thing I remember. I was three years old — I know that because it was 1978. The first thing I remember in my life is the shot of Christopher Reeve wearing the Superman clothes and flying. That image provoked such an impact on me that from that moment on, I wanted to be Superman. And then as I grew up, I wanted to be the guy who made Superman possible. So I found out that there were these guys called actors and I wanted to be one. I was obsessed with movies when I was a kid. That movie created such an impact on me, and when I watch it again nowadays, I still believe it’s a masterpiece. It established the superhero genre on a level that, I think nowadays there’s not any movie that has it better than that for me, in the genre. The reality of the special effects, the chemistry between Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder is still there. The way Richard Donner recreates Smallville… It’s an endless film to me. It’s an amazing film, especially nowadays."

"Let’s do horror. I would say The Descent, which was a film that was, I don’t know, maybe a few years old now. What I like about the first 45 minutes of the film is they develop the characters and the relationships between these women who are going to descend into this cave in the latter part of the film, and that’s where the horror and the mayhem starts to happen. But they give the time to draw you into the lives of these women, and so as a result, you care about them by the end of the film. I thought that was an accomplishment for a horror film. It also has one of the scariest scenes I’ve seen in a long time. They have these monsters down in the cave that are done with special effects ? green screen or however the hell they do it, CGI ? but there’s a scene where one of the girls, who now you care about, crawls through a tunnel and gets trapped in this space that’s too small, and she can’t move forward and she can’t move back. Talk about simple, but horrifying if you’re claustrophobic in any way. Really, really well shot and really well played."

"Probably everybody has that on their list. [Star Wars] came out and I just finished my sophomore year at CalArts. The May of ’77, saw it opening weekend at the Chinese Theatre. It worked in so many ways, but one of the things personally [that] was so inspiring [was] how it entertained an audience to a new level. I was there with a packed audience. I waited six hours. Towards the climax, when Luke is in the X-Wing and he’s going down the trench, I was just shaking I was so excited. And I’d never seen an audience so excited. First of all, it was everybody, from kids to adults, teenagers. Everybody was going crazy for this film. The quality of the storytelling, where it’s one foot in sort of the past and one foot in the future, I was so impressed by that. I came out and said, “That’s what I want to do with animation.” Many of my friends left animation [because of Star Wars] and went to actual special effects. At that time, animation was thought of just for kids. I saw this and said, “No, no, I want to entertain audiences.” That’s all I think about when I make my movies."

"An early work by Resnais. It’s only a half hour long, but I’ve not seen a film of any length that matches it in emotional resonance.
 It transcends the documentary form. I saw it around the time I first saw The Night of the Hunter, in the late fifties, and I was about to film my first documentary. Night and Fog begins with a beautiful color landscape beneath a blue sky. The camera cranes down to reveal a long stretch of barbed wire, followed by shots of vast fields overgrown with tall grass, trees, and wildflowers. The camera tracks slowly across the placid landscape, dotted with abandoned red brick buildings that could have been warehouses or barns; then a sudden shock cut to black-and-white footage of victims of the Holocaust. The long, tracking color shots of the killing fields of Auschwitz and Majdanek, only ten years after the end of the Second World War, are intercut with horrific black-and-white shots of piles of dead bodies, rooms filled with women’s hair, and personal effects. A dry, dispassionate narration is heard throughout, written by Jean Cayrol, a survivor of the camps. Night and Fog is one of Resnais’ first “memory” films and points the way to his later masterpieces, Hiroshima mon amour and . . ."