"This has to be number one because it’s the film that opened the door to foreign cinema for me. I first saw it at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1967. I was stunned by the playful mix of romance, jazz, gangsters, and Paris. I must have seen it fifteen times since. In 1976, I played the lead in an homage to Breathless, Amos Poe’s Unmade Beds—though my connection to Belmondo sadly ends there."

"My first foreign film experience, at the age of eleven, is one of the finest films on the subject of the Holocaust. Without showing any scenes of extreme violence, it fully realizes, through its simple characters, the devastation of what happened and how it can happen if people don’t pay attention or fall prey to delusion. Here is where I also discovered great acting for the first time. Forty years later, Ida Kaminska and Josef Kroner’s performances remain amongst the best I have ever seen on the screen."

"""And then you get into the contentious fifth film, and I’ve jotted down a bunch of things I thought, well Ran is a possibility. I love Akira Kurosawa‘s take on King Lear, I love what he did to it. I love the movement, the battles. You know, there’s nothing about that film I do not enjoy. Laurel and Hardy’s Way Out West, because I thought that would be a wonderful choice, and it does have, to my mind, the finest dance in the whole of film. But, I thought about A Matter of Life and Death, which was a film that was enormously inspirational when making Good Omens. I felt like that was of the same DNA as the thing that we were doing … Also Bedazzled, the original Peter Cook and Dudley Moore Bedazzled, which again has a lot of the DNA of Good Omens in it. But eventually I came down on Belle et la bête, [Jean] Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. I remember watching it and feeling transported. For me, it’s like dreaming. It does the same that Bride of Frankenstein does, where I can never quite remember the plot when it’s over, I’m just aware that it’s finished now and this wonderful place that I went has gone away. My children do not like black-and-white films, and once, for Father’s Day, my daughters asked what I wanted for Father’s Day, and I asked, “Will you watch this film with me? It’s a foreign language film, so you won’t like it, and it’s black and white, so you won’t like it, but will you watch it with me?” They said, “Well yeah, for Father’s Day we will.” And what I loved was that after 10 minutes, they had forgotten that it was a foreign language film, and they had forgotten that it was a black-and-white film, and they were entranced by this retelling of Beauty and the Beast, made by Cocteau not even on a shoestring; he’s in post-war France, immediately post war, and they had no money for anything. Everything is being improvised. Everything is being created on the fly, and yet what they come up with is something that is so much cooler than any infinite amount of CGI."""

"Do I get pretentious? Because this is foreign. {laughs] I love that German film from a few years ago that won the Oscar, The Lives of Others. Such a great movie. I’ve seen it a bunch, and I own it. I love, love, love that movie, and I found that it was just intensely riveting and scary and beautiful and so well crafted, so well plotted as a movie. And such a sad comment on a time in a certain country, but also a really beautiful comment on people being altered and finding their humanity again. I thought that movie was really special."