"Gena Rowlands is a force of nature and John Cassavetes’s greatest muse. I saw this movie straight out of theater school and it shook me to the core. Her performance is electric. It was everything I love about acting: raw, dangerous, unpredictable, shocking, alive. You can’t keep your eyes off of her. It’s difficult to explain, but I didn’t know that films could do what Cassavetes does with this film. It was the film that made me see the potential that the medium could have. And it seriously made me want to be in one."

"One of my other favorites is Defending Your Life, the Albert Brooks movie. It’s my favorite of his movies. I was kind of at the exact age where… I was graduating high school when that came out, and it spoke directly to me for whatever reason. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder in a movie theater than the Past Lives Pavilion. It’s a really, really great movie. I don’t know if it’s my second favorite movie ever, but I would put it in my top five."

"I return to Polanski’s early films to get excited about blocking and also adjusting the camera in relation to blocking. He’s the master of the camera adjustment. I’ve learned so much about directing from watching his films. Cul-de-sac is like his existential Beckett movie, and it draws a lot from absurd theater. Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby play with genre so brilliantly, upending conventions while honoring them. Macbeth always struck me as one of his masterpieces, and it’s clearly haunted by the Manson murders in a very visceral way."

"I return to Polanski’s early films to get excited about blocking and also adjusting the camera in relation to blocking. He’s the master of the camera adjustment. I’ve learned so much about directing from watching his films. Cul-de-sac is like his existential Beckett movie, and it draws a lot from absurd theater. Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby play with genre so brilliantly, upending conventions while honoring them. Macbeth always struck me as one of his masterpieces, and it’s clearly haunted by the Manson murders in a very visceral way."

"I return to Polanski’s early films to get excited about blocking and also adjusting the camera in relation to blocking. He’s the master of the camera adjustment. I’ve learned so much about directing from watching his films. Cul-de-sac is like his existential Beckett movie, and it draws a lot from absurd theater. Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby play with genre so brilliantly, upending conventions while honoring them. Macbeth always struck me as one of his masterpieces, and it’s clearly haunted by the Manson murders in a very visceral way."

"I return to Polanski’s early films to get excited about blocking and also adjusting the camera in relation to blocking. He’s the master of the camera adjustment. I’ve learned so much about directing from watching his films. Cul-de-sac is like his existential Beckett movie, and it draws a lot from absurd theater. Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby play with genre so brilliantly, upending conventions while honoring them. Macbeth always struck me as one of his masterpieces, and it’s clearly haunted by the Manson murders in a very visceral way."

"Do I have to say anything? I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t love this film. There’s a reason it ran for over a year in one theater near me growing up in New York (as well as a reason its distributors tried to dump it, since it was so resolutely odd and unique . . . and wonderful). Having Bud Cort do a cameo in my first feature was a private dream come true. A film to live by, this affected and inspired me as much as a person as as a filmmaker."

"For all the splendors in this masterpiece, it’s another scene of actors watching a film within the film that left an impression on me. Guido is in a theater watching rushes of various actresses auditioning for the part of his mistress, while his wife (Anouk Aimée)—trying to contain her conflicted emotions—finally gets up to leave. This sequence was the basis for 8½ Screens, an art installation I did for the opening of TIFF Bell Lightbox, the home of the Toronto International Film Festival. There’s a clip of it on YouTube."