"It’s a pretty recent movie but Selma, the Ava DuVernay movie from a couple of years ago. I just can’t remember seeing a movie and it being so clear to me that it was a masterpiece. I mean, I felt similarly about Moonlight this year — I was just like, “Oh, it’s incredible.” But usually movies take a minute to settle with me, and as I was watching Selma I just was like, “This is a masterpiece. This is an incredible movie.” The story is so powerful and the performances are incredible. And it’s made with such clarity and such passion. I think she’s one of the great film makers."

"My dad introduced me to cinema when I was a kid, to watch old films and foreign films, and so I think I was just touched by the idea of a young kid getting to know the projectionist in a village and falling in love with the world of cinema. I kind of related to that. And then I related to the idea of a kid’s passion for movies and eventually getting out and making movies himself. I like the idea of that. And the pacing of the film, and the beauty of the cinematography, and the relationship between the boy and the projectionist is very, very sweet and very touching."

"At an early point in this novel, Lessing’s heroine, Anna, says that she wishes she could write ‘a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life.’ That’s as good a way as any to describe this book and its effect on me—but it’s also a genuinely involving and surprisingly enjoyable read, especially given that it is by a writer with almost no sense of humor. There was a time when I believed that any modern woman had to read The Golden Notebook, but I’m no longer given to pronouncements that are quite so doctrinaire."

"The Count of Monte Cristo, which I happened to have been in. Only because, man, I really dug how Edmond Dantes went about, his passion in getting his revenge. The movie just looks absolutely beautiful, but, like I said, it was just the story and how well it was made into film. Not just how it was a guy who’s like, “Okay, we’re gonna go get our stuff, we’re just gonna shoot this guy, we’re gonna have a shootout…” No, Dantes really processed his revenge in such a passionate way. Makes you wish other people went about doing thing more thoughtfully and more passionately."

"Directed by the Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ordet is yet another film made in 1955 to which I’m deeply indebted. There is a stunning scene of literal resurrection that inspired my own visual approach to The Exorcist and gave me the courage to stage a supernatural event as if it were actually happening, without scary lighting or weird angles. Like many of Dreyer’s other films, including Vampyr and The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet is based on literary source material (in this case, a play). But all his films are deeply spiritual in their examinations of the mystery of faith, and purely cinematic."