"Finally, we’re going to go with a film that is so culturally relevant that as soon as I say it you’ll be able to quote at least one line from it. We’re going to go with Dirty Dancing. Because, come on, nobody puts Baby in a corner, right? Of course it’s been acted out, it’s been referenced in numerous films. It was in Crazy, Stupid, Love. This is the move that Ryan Gosling does to get the girls, right? And he and Emma Stone reenact this scene. So, you want to talk about a film that just had an amazing soundtrack, the performances were great, and it speaks to the confusion of teenagers growing up, but not in a, I feel like, a “loner” teenager way. There’s been a lot of teenage films where they feel like a loner. This is someone who liked her family, and she was a little irritated with her older sister as siblings tend to be, but she liked her dad and her mom, and when push came to shove at various points, she ran to her dad to help. There was something striking about how all of that worked together in a film that just made you feel good and want to dance and want to take someone to see, and then, how many years later, that film still holds up. And if you don’t believe me, go watch it. It still works."

"The first two that jump to mind are both from my formative years. One is To Kill a Mockingbird and the other was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, both of which are films that I saw at a young age. Obviously To Kill a Mockingbird is, you know, one of the great novels of the 20th century, and a beautiful film adaptation of that that I think did a great job of… I mean, this is from a current perspective, having read the book a couple of times and read the book to my kids and seen the movie. But, at the time — I don’t know how old I was, if I was nine or eleven or twelve — but I was sort of viewing it from the perspective of the kids. The whole story is told from Scout’s perspective and the other kids, and like most kids growing up, I sort of saw Gregory Peck as the film version of my dad in the good guy standing up for what’s right and doing the right thing. Yeah, just a really well-made film with characters that I think are relatable to a really wide range of people, as all great storytelling is, whether it’s a film or a novel, or whatever it is. Something that’s accessible for a variety of ages and demographics and is something that speaks to a lot of people."

"And their next movie, Raising Arizona, came out and had this insane soundtrack. That crazy Pete Seeger “Ode to Joy” on the banjo with whistling and yodeling and it was totally mad. And every joke on it landed for me — one of the things about the Coens is there’s history in every shot. Some people say “Where do you want to put the camera?” but in the morning, they’ll draw up signs and give the actors with the lines and below a drawing from the storyboard of the camera angle they’ll be in when they have those lines. They have it all cut in their head when they do it. This is why they have control. Economy is the essence of art you know. I was looking at the detail in Raising Arizona and I thought, “We must have seen all the same films growing up because it was just speaking to me.” And it got to the part where John Goodman and his cohort come out of the ground and go into the service station to comb their hair and in the mirror you can see in spray paint OPE POE backward in the mirror. And I thought, “Really interesting this is how detailed they are.” They would take a quote from Dr. Strangelove like “Purity of essence, peace on earth” and put it backwards on a mirror and spray paint it on the wall somewhere backwards in Arizona."