"The film that inspired If…. I grew up in the concrete new town of East Kilbride in the early 1980s, and it was almost impossible to see such films. I had to make do with a few tantalizing stills in library books, so this and Věra Chytilová’s Daisies were at the top of the list of films I wanted to see when I moved to London. Neither film disappointed. Zéro de conduite was of course shot by Dziga Vertov’s brother Boris Kaufman, who would later shoot the next film on this list."

"Top to bottom, a perfect film – pure joy! Brittany Murphy was one of the greats. I just think the joy in that movie and, again, maybe taking a character that seems harder to empathize with out of the gate, and [having us] realize what a human being she is, and [it’s] an exploration of a different side of culture. As a Jersey girl, it was always very fascinating and fun for me to see that sort of L.A. kids’ culture and, of course, the fashion. I just miss the ’90s."

"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."

"Mark Sandrich was the superlative director of Fred Astaire musicals, strikingly more successful at this demanding (though charming) form than the better known George Stevens. It’s very funny, chock-a-block with great character actors, and with wonderful music (Cole Porter) and choreography (Astaire with Hermes Pan). There’s something about works at the beginning of a form or style of cinema, even if rough and lacking couth, that I find more lovable and compelling than that form perfected (which in this case would be the gorgeous Top Hat made by Sandrich the next year)."

"I would say Unforgiven is probably top of that list. What about it, is simply the way that Clint Eastwood demystified and destroyed our notion of a Western. I mean, demolished the genre; he turned it upside down. It was marvelous acting, and at times, his use of monologue and dialogue — that doesn’t ever take place in Westerns. He just took a baseball bat to the genre, and it was just incredibly profound to me. Wildly entertaining. He did things in the storytelling that hadn’t been done in the way that they were done. Incredible."