"For a myriad of different reasons. It’s the ultimate group of lawless action buddy movies. They have all spawned from this. Every sort of two handed buddy movie as The A-Team and — it all comes from this one film: Seven Samurai. It gave Hollywood a genre. Not only did it influence the western genre very obviously, with Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood, but every genre of outsider, loner, anti-hero. The character played by Toshiro Mifune, that’s the quintessential character in Hollywood. You’ve seen it played by Montgomery Clift. You’ve seen it played by James Dean, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro. They’ve all been influenced in some way by that one character that appears in the Seven Samurai. The wildness. The gregariousness. The mad genius. The outsider. The survivor. Of course, you know the film is an incredibly, beautifully shot film. Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest writers of all time. It speaks for itself. I’ve seen it well over a hundred times. But years ago. 20 years ago — possibly the first. Maybe even 25 years ago was the first time I saw it. An extraordinary movie."

"I’m skippin’ past all my movies right now in my mind, just so you know [laughing]. You know what? I’m going to go with Boomerang. Yeah. It was either going to be Boomerang or The Color Purple, but I feel like I’m trying to pick movies that not everybody picks. So I’m going with Boomerang. It was Eddie at the height of Eddie. It was a movie that was different than you had seen him do. The romantic comedy genre, and of course Halle Berry, who was still a fresh face at that time. I really enjoyed the construction of that movie. I’m a fan of the Hudlin Brothers [Warrington and Reginald]. They actually gave me my first internship in this industry. Absolutely. Straight out of college. My first internship was on a movie they made for Miramax, called Ride. I went down to Jacksonville, Florida and I was a camera PA on that movie. I learned a lot about Hollywood production. At that point I had made a movie, but it was an independent film that I made while I was still in college. This was my introduction to Hollywood filmmaking."