"If David Thewlis in Naked is my favorite male performance, then Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher must be my favorite female performance. I saw this with my mom at the theater when I was about fourteen or fifteen and we both loved it so much. I remember thinking, I want to make movies like that. I’ve always felt that the first films he made in Austria, especially the trilogy (The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, and 71 Fragments), were a little too academic. He really avoided performances. But when he moved over to France with Code Unknown and then The Piano Teacher, something happened where he started making very passionate filmmaking. The actors are giving great performances while still being very clinical and brutal in their rejection of sentimentality."

"The Mirror was the closest cinema came to poetry. Tarkovsky abandoned narrative and mixed up different perspectives, stitching together the personal and the historical in a totally unique way. He made some other powerful films, but for me The Mirror is the one I keep going back to for air and inspiration. Its collage, fractured-mirror approach and refusal of anything literal and linear make sure the film will always keep its power and mystery, not unlike Eliot’s Waste Land. I have a problem these days getting through Tarkovsky’s more linear films, with these long, slow tracking shots that have spawned so many imitators (mainly male directors who love to exercise their power over a captive audience for hours). The other Tarkovsky film I can watch repeatedly and keep discovering anew is Ivan’s Childhood."

"Lugosi’s my favorite. I think he’s in almost every movie I picked here.I didn’t even realize it till I did my list and it’s like, “Oh, s—, He’s in every movie I picked.” Another one is Murders in the Rue Morgue. 1932 again, with Lugosi as Dr. Mirakle, who’s desperately trying to mate a woman with a gorilla. Again, you watch — basically, he wants the gorilla to have sex with this woman, and they’re sort of dancing around the topic the whole time. He’s mixing their blood, and when he’s done with the ones that failed, he just dumps them in the river. It’s pretty f—ed up. Again the male leads seem completely… Oh, they’re from “blah blah blah” acting, and Lugosi is so bizarre and incredible, as always."