"I first saw This Is Spinal Tap when I was seven or eight, and it totally changed my life. This was comedy. This was how you performed comedy. It gave me a leg up at an early age. The Criterion disc is a must because they do commentary out of character. Listening to those three guys talking about how they created and related to these characters, how they approached scenes, and where the inspiration for each scene came from taught me a lot. Thanks, Criterion!"

"I love Roland Kirk's stuff, it's always got these mad quirky bits in it, a bit like Mingus or like Monk, but very unique to him. It's a really sweet record, really beautiful, and again it has a link to nature and spirituality. It's deep but it has a lot of humour. Charming arrangements and melodies and a real lightness of touch. I love all those things where you hear him growl on the flute or shout or let off one of his conches."

"Number two would be also Boris Karloff, as Frankenstein’s monster in Frankenstein. That was another performance that left me just chilled and with such imagery that’s emblazoned in my mind, and he channeled something completely different for that. He was a completely different character. It showed his diversity as an actor, and his subtleties. That was an era of filmmaking where people over-did it a lot, and he found subtleties as Frankenstein’s monster that I just thought were [wonderful]. Less was more, and he knew that."

"This movies brings me back to my first years discovering cinema. In the South of France, where I grew up, the first video-clubs were in newsagents. One could mostly find horror and porn movies. This is how I discovered Carpenter, Argento, Cronenberg. In Assault on Precinct 13 and in a lot of other Carpenter films a man is trying to reconstruct society. At the time, horror films were rooted in real emotions and actual fears, like Dario Argento’s fear of the Red Brigades."

"I love comedy. This got a lot of flak when it came out, because everyone said it was Monty Python’s diss towards Jesus. But it’s not. It’s looking at the ridiculous foundations of religions in general and how we set those things up to be things of truth. And when you point a finger at them, they can very easily become things of comedy. Great film, and one of those that the more you watch it, the funnier it gets. Like This is Spinal Tap."

"Say Anything is just such a sweet coming-of-age movie. I just love everything about it: the romance, the comedy, the time period, the music, and the chemistry between the two lead characters. This movie was the beginning of a lot of great careers. The image of John Cusack and the Peter Gabriel song “In Your Eyes” is just so iconic. And Cameron Crowe is my favorite director of all time. If there were a sixth favorite film, it would have been Almost Famous."

"For me, this created a whole new layer of filmmaking. It’s an amazing movie, and a little bit like La strada in that you don’t have to be a filmmaker or enthusiast to appreciate it. It just plays out like a really good documentary and a really good fiction, and it says a lot not only about Iranian society but about the human condition. This is the richest movie Kiarostami made, in my opinion, and it’s one of the best works of Iranian cinema."

"If I had to pick a key phrase for Cassavetes it would be the joy of participating in the actors’ freedom. He was really somebody who allowed actors’ greatness to flourish. Guided by Cassavetes’s incredible ability, an actor manages to guide the viewer through a structure that has a lot of freedom within it. It’s like when you watch a game and the players are playing it and there’s a set of rules, but the result of the game depends on the skill of the players themselves."