"The Lady Vanishes is one of the great World War II films. I honestly might have seen it two dozen times. I adore it, each and every scene. As I adore almost every Hitchcock film. And, in passing, I have to mention the greatest book on Hitchcock, which is also one of the finest on film and on the creative process in general, Truffaut’s marvelous work called Hitchcock, in which he interviews Hitchcock about his films. As for Mike Leigh, he is one of my most treasured filmmakers. I love his subject matter, and I love his actors. I shouldn’t admit this, but part of the reason I love his actors so much is that I can think of no other director, no one, who works with his actors in ways so similar to my own. We could sort of be the same person as directors. And Topsy-Turvy is one of my favorite of all Mike Leigh’s films because, except for the actors who appear in it, it resembles no film he had ever shot before. The style is different. The content is different. And it’s about the theater!"

"Yeah, and The Island of Lost Souls is amazing, from 1932 with Charles Laughton as Dr. Moreau. That movie is amazing. That movie’s dark. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the extras — I mean, even now you watch like, this is really disturbing. The extras are supposed to be the half-man/half-animal people. You can tell they got really bizarre-looking extras before they did the makeup, and everybody looks like they’re deformed and f—ed up. Again, Lugosi plays the leader of the beast men. He’s not in it a lot, but of course he has the line that everybody remembers about the House of Pain: “He who breaks the law goes back to the House of Pain.” He’s in the movie for five minutes and steals the movie. Charles Laughton is incredible. But it’s demented again. The basic premise is a crazy one. They have the beast men and they’re being operated on and just screaming. It’s like, “This is not fun.” You have little kids running out of the theater in tears, or adults. It’s amazing. Still amazing. The cinematography’s amazing. Everything about it is just incredible."

"I’ll give it a shot. “Favorites” questions are my least liked questions because I’ve never been any good at favorites. But I’ll give it a shot. I’ll probably disappoint every fan out there. The ones that stick out as being my favorites, most of them are from when I was young, because movies just meant something different to me when I was a kid than what they mean to me now. They still mean a lot to me, but also it’s, once you start working in the film business, your appreciation shifts. The Neverending Story, without a doubt. I loved that movie. I thought the girl in that was hot. I thought she was so cute. I was like, “I want to be her when I grow up.” Wear a necklace on my forehead and say, “Call my name, Sebastian. Call my name!” I remember, I was living on an island; we didn’t have a movie theater, we just had a town hall. Every now and then they would drop a big sheet and a projection thing. We’d sit on wooden chairs. So, The Neverending Story."