"The first one — I would say Badlands. I caught Badlands in college for the first time. They actually had a film screening of it at my film school. I’d just never seen a film like that before. I’ve never seen a film that was paced that way, that was structured that way, that felt that honest. But also at the same time kind of dreamy and transportive. I remember immediately going home to my dorm room and I called my older brother — who’s kind of my bellwether for cool interesting things — [and asked], “Have you seen this film?” I tried to explain a theme to him, which was nearly impossible of [Martin] Sheen‘s character giving his comb away to the National Guard soldiers at the end of the film. My brother: “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” You realize that’s kind of how that movie is — you can definitely revel in it and share with it when other people have seen it. But it’s such a beautiful anomaly that when you try and tell people about it that haven’t seen it it’s kind of impossible to categorize or just explain. Badlands — it touched upon a stylized truthfulness that I wanted to do in my film."

"I’m going Empire Strikes Back, 100 percent. My favorite of all of them, hands down. Yes, the dark undertones, but I think you get some of the greatest lines out of it. I think coming up with the idea for Hoth and the wampa and the AT-ATs was unbelievable during that time. It still holds up, which is tough, and I say this as a diehard Star Wars fan. A New Hope gets a free pass because it’s the first one we saw, but you go back, and of course we’ve all seen a lot of the gaps, and some of the stuff is so cartoony and over the top. You don’t get that in Empire Strikes Back. You get a group of guys who came back for the second one with a new director and were like, “Alright, we’re in it to win it.” We’re going to get deeper into these relationships; we’re going to see them kiss, and how awkward that is; we’re going to see Han save his buddy and throw him inside a tauntaun in the first 20 minutes. And you’re like, “Whoa! We’re going very deep here.” And I’m not even talking about the ending. That’s just the first 20 minutes."

"…and it’s something that happens with Raging Bull, also. And Marty Scorsese’s notion of sound — the memory. Sound memory is so important in Raging Bull; when you see the scene where Robert De Niro shows Cathy Moriarty his father’s house and tells him about the bird — “It was a bird, it’s dead” — and what’s going on around in the street, and you realize how important sound is. The other thing is the acting: Joe Pesci and Robert are so great together. I mean, the hardest thing in the world to do is just shoot two people in a room. All these other things are very easy to do — you get 150 people, you turn your camera on, you create a situation and as long as nobody looks at the camera you can make them seem very real. [Two people in a room] is really difficult. If I think of Robert Duvall, say, talking to Al Pacino in The Godfather two, when Al says to him, “Well what’d you get my son for Christmas?” and he says, “I got him a little car,” and Robert Duvall puts his hand over the couch — these are gestures that people understand as human gestures and they bring you into the storytelling."