"This is hard, because it could be many things. I mean, it could be Kubrick, it could be Haneke again. Do I need to mix it up a little bit? I feel like I’ve gone very serious. I think it’s either 2001: A Space Odyssey or Funny Games by Michael Haneke. What I like about Funny Games is a moment, actually, where all of it… OK, I think 2001 is a better movie. However, there’s a moment in Funny Games that’s genius, that I love, which is when he turns to the audience, and suddenly turns the whole movie into this kind of study, where we are accountable as an audience. Because we like the violence that’s happening in the movie, and he’s doing it for us, so suddenly we’re culpable. And I think that’s a really cool moment in film that I haven’t really seen other than that. Yeah, I thought that was really clever. Also, I’m talking the American remake, not the original, because he remade it shot-for-shot for the American audience, which is really interesting, because he made it in German and then it only had so much reach, and then was like, “I want to make this for a society where violence maybe is a little more glamorized.” And I’m not just saying that about Americans; I think we’re the same in the UK, where we really like watching that on-screen. It’s just a really interesting study into that, and so, for that reason, I’m going with that. And one time I hosted a screening where all of our friends came down and watched it, and I have never seen a more depressed group of people in my life, and it was a huge mistake. [laughs] Everyone left immediately. No one hung around after."

"All right. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll pick something completely weird and ridiculous for the very reason that I just said, and that would be Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, specifically for the scene in which Jim Carrey births himself from the anus of a fake rhino, because it is one of the single most genius pieces of comedic writing that will never be given its due because it’s part of a ridiculous, vaguely racist, silly comedy. The setup for that whole sequence is incredible from the point you see him. He’s inside this rhino, which he’s using as a sort of eavesdropping device, and it’s so meticulously done. There’s a fan inside because it’s hot. The fan breaks, so he has to undress. All to get to this point where he literally squeezes his way out of the behind of this rhino in front of a family of tourists who just effectively see a rhino giving birth to a screaming, naked human being. The industry involved in setting that joke up, the way that it just creeps up on you, like you’ll think, “Oh, it’s funny because he’s inside a rhino. It’s funny because it’s hot. It’s funny because he’s taking off his underwear.” And then suddenly, you realize, “Oh, wait a minute, this was a long game they were playing here. This is a buildup.” And it snuck up on you. And suddenly he starts to, as only he can, emerge from the back of this rhino, and then this family pulls up, and it’s just brilliant. I think that sequence should be celebrated in no uncertain terms because it is just a genius piece of comedy executed with the extraordinary aplomb that that man is capable of displaying."

"This one — they’re just kissing cousins, really — but the last Paul Newman film I’ll talk about is Hud — just the greatest introduction to a character maybe ever on screen. You’ve got this goofy kid walking around town and he walks past the bar, and there’s glass on the sidewalk and the bar owner’s sweeping it up. And the kid goes, “Did you have trouble in here last night?” “I had Hud in here last night.” Such an awesome way to introduce the main character of this film. When you first meet him, he’s walking out of this married woman’s house putting his boots on and the husband pulls up, and he immediately blames his nephew. It’s this really incredible thing. I was lucky enough to work on a college professor’s documentary called The Rough South of Larry Brown. Which is about the writer Larry Brown out of Oxford, Mississippi. In that documentary Larry Brown talks about his writing, he says, “Yeah, you read my stuff and you read a little bit and you might think it’s pretty funny. And then you read a little bit more and you realize, it’s not funny worth a damn.” And that’s Hud. You start it off and you’re like, “Gosh, look at this rapscallion, this character,” and then you realize, “Wow, that’s not funny; there is some deep stuff inside that man that is hurt and angry, but is manifesting itself in very evil ways.” The complexity of that — it’s different than Newman’s character in The Hustler. In The Hustler, he’s doing pride, but there’s something deep going on in Hud that’s darker. It’s more about family and legacy and things that I think, because it’s attached to the family, I relate to very much. I had to deal with familial relationships that are complex."