"Gregory Nava’s film was shown at a Friday school assembly at the private Quaker school I attended from kindergarten to twelfth grade. It was International Day or some special Friday event, and we had the whole morning blocked off. I remember being floored by the rough-hewn portrayal of migrants who were my age, crawling through sewer tunnels as if they were in a Victor Hugo novel. In my twenties, I would go on to chronicle the journeys of Latin American and Caribbean migrants who crossed into the United States without documents. I would ride in the backs of trucks with them, interview them at U.S. Border Patrol processing stations, track their families, who had paid coyotes thousands of dollars. As a thirtysomething mother living in Houston, our Guatemalan babysitter borrowed $1,800 because her son was being held in a safe house in Northern Mexico. After his release, he was picked up by Border Patrol and held at a processing center in Houston. An editorial friend of mine from the Houston Chronicle visited him there and wrote about his journey. He was eventually released and was reunited with his mother. The impact of this movie cannot be understated. I was lucky enough to meet Gregory when I was a Los Angeles Times reporter covering the lack of diversity in Hollywood, and I remain a fan of his work."

"I’ve always been fascinated by the film Welcome to the Dollhouse, the Todd Solondz film. It’s a really dark comedy. It might be because I grew up in Long Island and it feels like where I grew up. A lot of the strangeness of it feels familiar to me. I love the look of it. I love the tone of it. When we started working on Freaks and Geeks, I thought a lot about Welcome to the Dollhouse, in terms of how it was lit, the production design, the strange cadences of its comedy, and these kids who feel like they’re in hell, their families and how their parents treat them. She (Heather Matarazzo) and that character (Dawn Wiener) is one of the greatest outcast nerd characters ever created in film or television. So it’s for someone who always loves a great underdog story. That’s one of my favorites and not a movie that makes it a triumphant fantasy for the nerdy girl either. That is never the Todd Solondz way. I thought about it when we did Freaks and Geeks because we often thought, “This movie is about how you handle failure. It’s not about succeeding. It’s not a show about wish fulfillment.” You see that in a lot of Todd Solondz work. I don’t think we had half the balls that he has."

"Something actually I watched recently — my girlfriend hadn’t seen it yet — A Streetcar Named Desire. I’m a huge Marlon Brando fan, as a lot of actors are. I know it’s a cliché, but obviously there are many performances of Brando’s that are just exquisite, but there’s something about that performance as Stanley in Streetcar that I think is just so raw and electric, as everybody says. I’m not saying anything that anybody hasn’t said before, so excuse my banter, but you just cannot take your eyes off him. I think as a young male actor at the time, when I first started seeing that film, you just wanted to deliver everything that he could deliver, and of course, none of us can. I certainly can’t, but the envy that I would feel for him, as well as the thrill of watching what he could do, was so mixed up in my head and my body that I just go back to that film every couple of years and watch it again. Obviously, Tennessee Williams is such a wonderful writer, and we all understand, I think, those powerful emotions that exist within families, and those things that seem very subtle at one point that can then be the breakdown of a family. I just think the combination of his writing and Brando’s performance is just exquisite. It’s really exquisite."