"Because that’s what I’ve got on my mind, at the top of the list is an Oscar Micheaux film. Oscar Micheaux was just a legendary figure, especially among African-Americans. And fortunately, because we’ve been able to recover his silent films, he now has a place in general film history. Within Our Gates, like many of his films, really deliberately and explicitly takes up questions of racial politics in America. The film is about a woman named Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer) who is a teacher and she goes up north to try to raise money for this small black school, the Piney Woods School, which was an actual full black school that still exists. We experience what she does in terms of the feeling of isolation that many people who moved from the south to the north felt. She’s escaping a really traumatic family history of violence in the south. The film represents lynching and the attempted rape of black women. Micheaux was just really out there in terms of showing the ugliest aspects of racism in America. He had very clear ideas about the way forward and how education uplifts the right living. These are the things that he felt were keys to black success. He’s a filmmaker whose films still spark really powerful debates today. Amazingly, this film had been lost for decades, and it was found in an archive in Spain. It had been there for decades. It was a title that just wasn’t recognizable to scholars who know Micheaux’s work. In the 1990s, the film was repatriated to the United States and restored. The inner titles had to be translated back from Spanish into English. In addition, it’s just the visual and the narrative power of film itself. It’s a real lesson for us to work hard to try to recover these lost works."

"Ok, I know this one’s cheating. I don’t care. So it’s not a movie, so what? It did start as a movie, so it totally counts. No TV show has meant more to me than Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Stop laughing, I’m serious. It’s one of the greatest things ever created in the history of mankind. I said stop. How dare you?! I will fight you! I will fight you and I will win. It’s the best. Every right-thinking person knows that. When Buffy was on the air, I recorded every single episode on my TiVo. I’m pretty sure my DVR thought I was a fourteen year-old girl. Whatever. The show was incredible. It refused to be pigeonholed. It defied, merged, bent, and blended genres, masterfully commingling fantasy and reality. It dealt with issues of real substance. It treated its audience intelligently, with the utmost respect. Over a decade after it went off the air, it still had residence in my head and heart, and served as a model for what Kubo became: real life wrapped in metaphor. Like Buffy, we explore triumph and tragedy, loss and healing, and compassion, and forgiveness through the stylized prism of fantasy. We acknowledge that part of life… is death. That lives can be thrown away and lost and upended in an unfair and random act of casual violence, without the grandeur and rousing speechifying often found in heroic movie deaths. People we love are often ripped away from us, in an instant. And we need to find a way to reconcile that a part of life is struggle, and it has a cost. Kubo and the Two Strings, like life, like Buffy, is wonderfully bittersweet. So thank you, Joss Whedon, for giving me so much high-spirited joy and gut-wrenching heartache. You saved the world. A lot."