"Another one that I was very inspired by and touched by in all its ugliness and brutality, but its daring story structure, was Gasper Noe’s Irréversible, which is an odd one, but I just found the idea of starting at the end and telling it backwards as such a conceit. And the world it took you in, and the way it took you in, I felt that was something new that I’d never seen before. It’s a journey through hell, starting at the end and working backwards to the beginning. So it’s sort of Paris’ underground, and it has a rape scene in it of Monica Belluci that’s one of the most frank, most brutal… You know, people kid about rape, you just say, “Yeah, I think you should watch this movie and see what rape really looks like. You should see how violent and terrible it is and then you’ll not make any jokes anymore.” It’s so balls-out, this film. It’s so unafraid. It’s so in-your-face. It’s one of those movies that, once you see [it], you will never forget it, and it keeps coming back to you and back to you. It’s not necessarily a pleasant thing, but it was definitely a filmmaker who said, “I don’t give a f— what anyone thinks. Anybody. Not the critics, not my friends, not the finance producers, nobody. I’m just going out to tell my story the way I want to tell it.” Vincent Cassel is so great in it, and Belluci. It’s really a very powerful movie."

"Virtuosic camera movements and demonstrations of technical originality, while impressive, can often do just as much to pull the viewer out of the experience as into it. One becomes absorbed by the mechanics on display, rather than gripped by the characters and their fates. In the case of “1917,” however, it is exactly the virtuosity of the filmmaking that makes the movie so exceptionally gripping. All of the cinematic elements, from the unique visuals to the rousing score, come together to give the audience a monumental, visceral sense of participation in the protagonists’ mission. As a viewer, I am intensely bound to the characters throughout the film. Their story is a relentless, brutal and violent experience — we’re in the foxholes, in the mud, with the corpses in the waterholes, running across rotting horse carcasses ­— and it all feels so real that you can smell the dead horses and burning houses. But amidst all the violence, there are small moments of kindness that moved me more than anything; moments that encapsulate humanity at its finest. The two soldiers in “1917” are far from classical heroes. They are afraid, confused and insecure. But their innocence, their love and their willingness to do the right thing, make them the most touching heroes I’ve seen in a long time. Watching “1917” is a weirdly humbling experience not because of its incredibly cinematic qualities, but because its portrayal of human dignity is so profound and moving. It keeps playing in the back of one’s mind, long after the projector turns off."

"The next one is The Thing, the remake with Keith David. That was the first Rated-R movie my mother ever let me see, and oh, dude, I was scarred. I was scarred in a good way. [laughs] John Carpenter’s The Thing took me to a whole other place, man. I was like, “Oh my god!” It was almost like losing your virginity. [laughs] Remember what I said about coming out of the theater a different way? The Thing was so violent and so creatively crazy, no one had ever seen anything like that on screen. You know, heads growing legs and walking away? I think Rob Bottin was the special effects guy on that. But, you know, heads ripping themselves off, dogs having three heads, it was just “Oh my god, there’s no stopping this!” One of my favorite movies; if it’s ever on, I can’t turn it off. I just can’t. It’s impossible. And the thing is, you see how most of the movies that I’m mentioning have always had copies, you know what I mean? It’s like, any movie that’s out there, you can see they’re trying to be like The Thing, or they’re trying to be like Aliens. It’s so wild how you see this kind of dynamic, because it changed for those filmmakers when they saw it too. So those are my top five for today. I tell you, that’s so hard to say. [laughs] Again, I love movies man. I just love it."