"Romeo and Juliet is on my list because I saw it when I was at a very formative age. I think I was 14 or 15, and at that age, girls are very dramatic about romance and they’re just starting to get those feelings, and love is very painful and very important. It’s overwhelming and you have these huge crushes, and so Romeo and Juliet is all about that huge first love. And you couldn’t have found two more beautiful teenagers than Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting… and that was the first time I had ever seen Michael York and he was stunning — he was stunning. The costumes were gorgeous. Zeffirelli was a beautiful artist. He designed theater and opera and sets, so it was just beautiful. I think why I love Italy so much now is because of that movie, and it made me fall in love with Shakespeare. That’s one of the first times that Shakespeare became not just some dusty old English thing that you had to study in school, but it became really alive. You know what else did that really well? Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet… So, Romeo and Juliet was my first introduction. I walked around pretending I was Olivia Hussey. I had my long dark hair parted in the middle, and we had these, like, hippie baby-doll blouses that had the empire waist, so I would wear that all the time and I’d sorta stare at myself in the mirror. Of course, there was nobody in Cleveland, OH who looked anything like Leonard Whiting, so it was all in my head."

"This one’s going to make you — well, I don’t know what you’re going to say to this, but Ordinary People, the Robert Redford film with Timothy Hutton, and Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, [has] got to be one of the most emotional films for me, just seeing the middle upper class being stripped of the veneer and seeing the dysfunction within. That film really captures that more than any other, I think, and certainly of that time, it was such a dangerous statement for Robert Redford to be making in a film like that. Every time I watch that film — and I must have seen it over 100 times — I weep. And Mary Tyler Moore’s performance in that film, I’m telling you, man, growing up in LA, I knew women like her… That was my friends’ mothers, without a doubt. It’s so simple and it’s just beautiful story telling. Judd Hirsch as the therapist and the relationship he creates with Timothy Hutton in that film is pretty special. I feel that if that film doesn’t touch you on some level, that you’re not human. Looking back at it now, it may seem like a very after-school-special choice, but if you really visit that film again, it holds up, man. It’s pretty compelling. You got to see that, man, on a Sunday when it’s a little rainy out there. I don’t know if you have a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, but whoever that is, sit with them, put that on. I’m telling you, dude. It’s like… How do I put it? It’s like The Notebook for our generation, or my generation, you know?"