"Magical realism is very important to me, and here you have some wonderful fantasy sequences—including Roy Scheider talking to Death, played by Jessica Lange. And there’s so much humor in this movie. It’s very serious on one level, because the protagonist is reflecting on his own mortality and the constant presence of death in his life, but it’s also very funny. Even when the hero is having a heart attack, the movie can’t help but break into a bit of musical theater! And as someone who used to dance before becoming a filmmaker, I’m in love with the choreography—how Scheider watches it all happening and participates in it, and how sexy it is. The dancing is very of the period—it’s maybe even a little dated—but the movie itself is not. It completely holds up."

"I was excited that I had the chance to sing something in [happythankyoumoreplease]. I did a lot when I was younger and I haven’t in such a long time, but I grew up doing musicals and musical theater. That was my real passion and I soon as I started doing films, when I was 14, I did less. I would love to do movie musicals or Broadway. [A music biopic] would be a dream of mine… that leads into my favorite movies. Coal Miner’s Daughter is my all-time favorite movie. A lot of that has to do with that’s just a dream sort of ideal role for me. I love country music. I love the idea of playing a country singer and the whole thing, I love it. And I love Sissy Spacek. So yeah, that’s one of my favorites."

"Bridesmaids. It is hands-down… That’s like the funniest movie that I’ve seen in a very long time. Girls Trip was really funny the other day. I loved that; I saw Girls Trip in my hotel room. Bridesmaids, I remember laughing out loud in the theater, like dying laughing over it. I mean, to watch how all of the actors interact, and the improv, and I love that they interact the way that my girlfriends and I interact. There’s a specific realness to it that I thought was depicted so well and I loved it so much. And I mean, we get to watch Melissa McCarthy in her Academy Award Nominated performance. I mean, she’s genius, she’s brilliant, and Kristen Wiig — all of them, every single actor in that movie is brilliant. I just loved that movie."

"Oh my God, how could I forget it? Jules and Jim. It’s that one with that very famous French actress, [yells at her husband to look up the name] Jeanne Moreau! I had never seen acting by a woman that way. She was so layered and complicated, and she threw things away that other actresses would nurture for a whole film. Do you know when I saw that movie — I saw it by myself — in the middle of it, it was so overwhelming I had to walk back and watch it from the back of the theater. I couldn’t just sit in my chair. It was so wonderfully honest and complex about relationships between men and women. And you saw aspects of her that were really dark that came out, as opposed to the stuff that was coming out back then."

"RoboCop is one of the few films I remember from my early youth. When I was in sixth grade, I had a friend whose grandfather had a movie theater at home in Mexico City and he took us there and showed us the film several times. I was just blown away. I loved the rhythm, the intensity, and the honesty. Everything was straightforward but meaningful and deeply felt. The actors were unknown to me and so ordinary that it made it all so real. This was also probably the first time in my life that I realized that sound in cinema could be so important. I could hear every bolt in the machine moving, and it was the first time I realized that what I was hearing was actually artificial sound, which was what made it all so real."