"I don't think I can explain how significant that record was to me. And the more I travel through my life as a musician, the more I find myself coming back to it again and again. My mom had a giant stack of vinyl – mostly classical, with a few rock records. When I was seven or eight years old and started listening to music by myself, that album became the daily soundtrack to my life. I would ask someone to put the record player on for me and I would sit there with big headphones one, listening, and having the record flipped over again and again and again. I would put the music on and just stare at the cover for 45 minutes. The artwork was so important. Sgt Pepper's was full of lyrics I could understand, stories I could follow, music that just made complete sense to me. I understood all of it, and it took me into a world. I think that was the first time I really fell in love with a record. I loved 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' and 'She's Leaving Home', but one of my favourites was the opening track. What I really wanted – what I still want – was to feel like I was at some amazing happening. As a seven-year-old fantasising about being a rockstar, which I was just starting to do, every time I listened to that opening track, I imagined that somewhere there's this group of people in this psychedelic wonderland listening to the Beatles. I didn't have any clue who the Beatles were or what they meant, I didn't have any fucking context. I just knew that if there was a party, this was the one I wanted to be at."

"Americanah is a dramatic romance and a coming-of-age story, a class narrative and a comedy of manners. I first read it in 2013 and I was struck with how exactly I related to Adichie’s depiction of the contemporary African immigrant experience. She captures it, expresses it, analyzes it and celebrates it. It’s a story begging to be experienced visually."

"Another film would be E.T. from Spielberg. I think somehow it’s a kind of fantasy film — very grounded in reality, very respectful of childhood. It’s a multi-layer, so the complexity of childhood — the way they portrayed a kid going through a very difficult moment in his life — I think it reminded me a lot of the kinds of movies that I love."

"In my 30s when I taught college English, freshmen had to take a Great Books course, so I got to teach Oedipus and Aristotle — a real disconnect for Americans whose gods were Reason and Progress. For years I kept a black and white photo of a stone-carved head of blind Oedipus next to a photo of Ezra Pound just before his death."

"After film school, I moved to Chicago. The first thing I did when I arrived in town was get a membership at Facets, the legendary video store and cinematheque. My membership allowed me to see everything that showed at the cinema. About two years later, when they put on a Pialat retrospective, I took full advantage of the membership. I had already made a few small relationship movies, and the descriptions of the films seemed right up my alley. As with most of my favorite films, I had a negative initial reaction to a lot of what I saw. The characters were abrasive, and all seemed to be stuck in never-ending destructive cycles. There were unexplained jumps in time, and I often felt disoriented. I came away from the series with a mixed reaction. Now, years later, it’s easy for me to recognize the impact the films had on me because I can see it in my work. No other filmmaker has had such a direct and visible influence on me, and I didn’t even realize it as it was happening."

"Well, I’m definitely a hopeless romantic and Titanic is one of my favorite movies. It basically came out when I was born, but my mom [showed me] Titanic when I was about — I want to say like eight, nine years old. It’s one of the movies I can never get tired of. I could watch it all the time. Actually, I had a really geeky moment: the make up artist that worked on this last film that I worked on — she had worked on Titanic, and I was like, “No way!” I freaked out and got to see a lot of behind-the-scenes pictures. I was totally fan-girling."