"Next on my list is Lawrence of Arabia. 1962, Peter O’Toole, directed by David Lean. When you watch this movie digitally remastered… I would love, at some point, to see it in a theater, to see it on film, the way it was meant to be seen. I’ve never done that with Lawrence of Arabia, and I would love to be able to do that. But when you watch that on a flatscreen — get a big enough one — with surround sound, the epicness of this movie… I mean, there’s an intermission for God’s sake. I’m not sure there’s a greater adventure than Lawrence of Arabia. And Peter O’Toole, he’s another guy who doesn’t have any superpowers. He’s a human being. He’s working off the human condition, what it is to be a man, and what he believes in, and what he’s trying to do out there in the middle of the desert. It’s epic. It’s epic in scope."

"My favorite film of all time is Jaws, for a number of reasons. I think it’s a perfect film; everything about it works. Obviously, the music — there are not many theme songs that actually elicit an emotion. From the floating barrels, the scene where Sheriff Brody’s on the beach, and stuff keeps blocking his view while he’s trying to see what’s going on and you’re in the audience [cringing]…additionally, my dad took me to see it in the theater when I was seven; he’s from Argentina and I guess he didn’t understand the rating system. The R rating meant nothing to him at the time. He bought me a Jaws movie poster afterwards and I stuck it in my bathroom and shut the door, and I didn’t open the door again for two years. I thought that when I opened the door, water and a shark would come pouring out and eat me. For the longest time, I couldn’t go in swimming pools."

"A Clockwork Orange. I was absolutely stunned by the entire thing. That’s a Warner Bros movie too, so they’re smiling right now. That’s an amazing movie. Everything about the execution is flawless. I saw that at a revival house when I was about 19 years old. There was a theater on 99th and Broadway called The Metro and all they did was show old movies, so in 1982 I went and I saw something from 1971 and it was 11 whole years old, and it was considered an old movie. Can you imagine seeing something from 2003 and having it being considered an old movie? That movie just blew me away. I couldn’t believe the level of violence at the beginning, then I couldn’t believe the social satire and everything, the execution, the slow motion, the way it was composed. And Malcolm McDowell’s performance? I was just riveted by the whole thing. It blew me away."

"I’m going to put in a strange one now, Any Body Can Dance. This is my favorite movie for the last two years. It’s a Bollywood musical dance movie, and I don’t watch enough Bollywood movies. I watch them on the plane sometime, and you know because I travel a lot from place to place, and this one has been my favorite Bollywood films. It’s nearly unpredictable, you know if you’re coming from a Western point of view, but I _____ the same way Bollywood has a different theater role. So for me it’s always surprising what happens in the story, at least it still is, and this is amazing music and dancing in it. It’s like 20 Indian Michael Jacksons. I’ve seen it twice, and parts of it I’ve seen three times. It’s crazy. It’s unusual for a recent movie for me. Yeah, it’s a weird one. It’s not going to be for everyone, I know."

"Well The Shining I thought a lot about, because we did Stephen King’s 1408, which was another movie set in a hotel room, and the madness of that. But I think just seeing it in theaters, you know — I think it’s when you saw it. My mom was from Boston, so we used to go to Nantucket, and it was the summer and I remember I snuck away in the afternoon to go see it, at around 4 or 6 o’clock or something, and when I came back out it was dark and I had to walk down this dark street alone. And I remember being really, I mean really scared coming out of that theater; like, I did not want to leave the street lights to walk home. The other experience I remember was I saw Apocalypse Now in the theaters and I remember coming out of that and I almost couldn’t speak. Stunned."

"A phenomenal slice-of-life family drama directed by the late Edward Yang from Taiwan that exemplifies some of the great realist cinema that was being made in Asian countries during this time (see Ang Lee). And despite the films having very little to do with each other, I always personally associate this film with In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai. Both films were released here in the U.S. at the same time, and I watched both on the same day. That was a crazy day. I still remember how the air tasted after stepping out of the theater that evening. Also—and I feel I have to mention this—I watched a third film that amazing weekend, After Life by Hirokazu Kore-eda, and it was my favorite of the three (and is one of my all-time favorites). Kore-eda has a nice movie called Still Walking available from Criterion, but I am hoping for a nice edition of After Life someday."

"My third film I want to say is highly recommended — and I’m sure many people have seen all these films, but I’m gonna tell you why — is Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction was the first film to me that had a descrambling formula of storytelling, accompanied with the power of perfect dialogue. This moved me artistically. I remember watching this film for the first time in the movie theater, and seeing the character get killed, and then seeing the character come back… He was my favorite character, right? It was John Travolta; at the time, I’m a big John Travolta fan, and Sam Jackson was just breaking out on the scene, but I loved him in the movie as well. But to see the story go into its own twists and turns really resonated with me as an artist and kind of related to the way that hip hop tells our hip hop stories. That’s why I suggest that movie. It descrambled the formula of Hollywood storytelling."