You don't forget the movies, but you forget the details of them.
The first movie I saw - and I don't know if it influenced me - was Ben Hur. We watched it outside in a corn field, and it ran backwards, so the first movie I ever saw was Ben Hur backwards.
The first movie I saw was 'Prince of Egypt' - that was the first movie I saw in theaters.
Some films survive long in theatres, and some stay longer in people's minds.
I'm not a walking encyclopedia. I'm not one of those types that knows every single film ever made or can recite every dialog.
You just never know with movies how they'll be seen in a few years. You have no idea. Like, movies that were super popular when they came out have been forgotten. And other movies - and I put 'Sarah Marshall' in this - kind of weirdly stand the test of time a little bit.
A lot of people who make films in my generation have the vocabulary of all the films they've seen before.
Before movies, memory unspooled differently in the mind, trailing off in dust-blasted fade-out rather than spliced-together flashback; before photography, memory rippled like a reflection on water's surface, less precise but more profoundly true.
One of my uncles took me to my first movie in a cinema - 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.'
Most movies are lucky to have one moment, one shot that you look at and you always remember that moment and that scene.
Movies, over time, as they do or don't find their audience, or they find a different audience, they change in your memory and in the eyes of those who see it.
I love archival films very much. I spent thousands of hours watching archive footage. Every time I see it, I see something. Sometimes I think I know this footage, but two years later, I see it again, and I see something new.
