"To Be or Not to Be, Ernst Lubitsch’s World War II movie. To make a comedy about World War II in the middle of World War II is major league balls, and he pulls it off brilliantly. It’s Jack Benny and Carole Lombard. It’s her last film; she’s amazingly funny. And Benny does this great trick of playing the character in the film and yet getting laughs off what you know about the Jack Benny character from out of the movie, without ever disrupting the flow of the story. Just a brilliant movie. Really well worth studying for how to direct a serious comedy about a serious subject, and yet be really funny."

"One of my favorite films is the movie Tootsie. I really love Tootsie. I just watched it when I was a kid and for some reason, I just, I’m obsessed with that movie. I think I’ve watched it 100 times. It’s just so funny and fun, and I love it. It’s cool. I like that it’s sort of about women, you know? It’s sort of about how he finds the woman inside himself, so there’s sort of like this feminine aspect to it, and I just love Dustin Hoffman. He’s amazing. I don’t know, I just love that movie. It’s emotionally totally satisfying to me, and it sort of makes me feel good while being interesting and smart."

"I just watched, on New Year’s with a bunch of high school friends, The Breakfast Club, which I hadn’t seen in years. I remember being very affected by it but I couldn’t believe how well it held up, and I also couldn’t believe how well I actually knew the movie — like, I remembered every frame of that movie. It’s such good storytelling and it’s such a perfect blend of comedy and pathos. I kind of underestimated the effect that John Hughes had on my consciousness. He really taught, I think, a whole generation of people empathy. It’s kind of a marvel, that movie. So that’s certainly one of them; I have to put that up there."

"After Gone and Road Warrior is Pulp Fiction, which I consider a perfect movie. I consider it a pitch-perfect movie. I’ve gotten to the point now where I pray to not come across it while channel surfing because, if I see five frames of it, then I have to sit and watch the rest of it. I’m now up to something like 30 or 40 times I’ve seen it. I just love that movie and all its dimensions, its crazy story structure, Quentin’s just brilliant dialogue, and the kind of mix of style and atmosphere with these memorable, memorable characters. Pulp is definitely one [of my favorites], although anything Tarantino would be good with me."

"I’m going to put The Apartment on there. Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon. You know, Billy Wilder is just one of my favorite filmmakers ever. That movie is one that has grown with me. That’s another movie that I definitely saw as a child and have felt differently about as I’ve gotten older. Its really about two lonely people and it’s so sweet and so funny, and the score — I think it’s the Charles Williams orchestra that does the score on that. I’m not going to get that right, but the score is just so, so beautiful. I feel like I can just hear the refrain of that and cry. I think it’s really a perfect movie."

"I know everyone’s expecting me to list off all these action movies, but Stand By Me. There’s something about the relationships and the performances in that movie that I found really inspirational. And this is before I was even considering being an actor. I just found it to be one of the more true, real, honest sort of movies that really had an effect on me. I watched it a week ago and got goose bumps. Especially with the whole River Phoenix thing and how he disappears at the end. How genius is he in the movie? There’s something about a movie like that that can be so effective with no gimmicks."

"That movie for me was my Marlon Brando experience before The Godfather, before Streetcar. It’s weird to be living in a modern world where acting has changed. Movies have changed so much, and yet you can still see what defined [Brando] and his performance. If I told you that so-and-so was the first person to do something 30 years ago, you’d be like, “Well, I don’t care, because people do it now all the time.” There’s still nobody doing what he does in that movie. And so that really changed everything for me. Also, there was something really exciting and sad about the whole political aspect of that movie. The whole blacklisting thing."