"I’ve probably seen this film more than any other. Nestor Almendros turned me on to it when I was looking for a DP to shoot Iguana. He recommended Luis Cuadrados, but I soon discovered he’d died of a brain tumor, having shot Spirit while 95 percent blind. He had his assistant describe the sets to him, then told him where to place the lights, and the intensity of each. The film itself is one of the greatest homages to movies ever made, but it’s also a poignant study of that traumatic moment in everyone’s childhood when you discover the reality of death."

"Roxane Gay is one of the funniest and most insightful authors, and her book of essays is essential reading because I think most women can relate to her varied interests, and I am no exception. Gay, an academic and prolific author, writes about watching certain reality shows but also recognizing how damaging they can be. She writes about feminism in a way that is deeply authentic and realistic. Also, as someone who has had to work her way up this business for years, I really appreciate that she is an overnight success twenty years in the making"

"Roxane Gay is one of the funniest and most insightful authors, and her book of essays is essential reading because I think most women can relate to her varied interests, and I am no exception. Gay, an academic and prolific author, writes about watching certain reality shows but also recognizing how damaging they can be. She writes about feminism in a way that is deeply authentic and realistic. Also, as someone who has had to work her way up this business for years, I really appreciate that she is an overnight success twenty years in the making."

"My favorite book ever. My father was a Dickens fanatic and brought me up to be one too. I’ve read all of his novels but I think this is the best. The story of an orphaned boy who wants so badly to be a gentleman that he forgets how to be a gentle man and becomes morally corrupt, until he is forced to accept the ugly reality of his true provenance. The early scenes where young Pip plays cards with the icy and cruel Estella, whom he worships and hates, are the ones that stay with me the most."

"When I got into documentaries in the mid-eighties, I discovered how you could not just observe but also sculpt reality. This is when I fell in love with the Czech New Wave. So Forman, Passer, Nemec. My favorite film from that era is probably Loves of a Blonde, which looks at the world without an agenda, rhetoric, or plot mechanics, but with lots of empathy and irony. It shows that if you have a good sense of casting and know where to put the camera and when not to cut, the most ordinary things can be lifted into something poetic and timeless."