"I don’t know which John Waters to pick. The go-to would be Pink Flamingos — that was another movie that was pivotal, when I discovered that — but I would pick Polyester out of his movies. I’ve got a big soft spot for John Waters, ’cause again, there’s a guy who’s doing things on his own terms, and I think people would find his topics shocking but he has a lot of kindness towards these people, these characters. I love him. I just saw him this weekend when I was in Maryland."

"This was the first political film I ever saw that had strong genre elements. I saw it when I was a teenager, so the story was quite obscure to me, and yet I fell into it because I was so enthralled by the pacing. It’s a brilliant portrait of what it means to be pushed into telling something other than the truth. I found myself riveted by all the different perspectives that can inform how we understand a single event."

"It’s hard for me to narrow it down to my favorite directors and favorite actors, too, but I love Matt Dillon. I love Beautiful Girls and I love Flamingo Kid — he’s responsible for a lot of my favorites, but I’m gonna have to pick Drugstore Cowboy. I saw it when I was a kid and I felt like it was such a different culture than any that I’d ever been exposed to, and I felt like instantly I was a part of it — even though I had no frame of reference. I mean, I wasn’t a “kid,” I was 14 or 15. I had started getting into, you know, that sort of pretentious high school literate phase where you start reading, like, Kerouac and Ginsberg and, I don’t know — I loved that world, that romanticized, thuggy, kind of petty crime world. I really romanticized it myself and just wanted to be a part of that world; there was something exciting about that for me. And I love the way it’s shot. I love the drugged out scenes; I love the way [Gus Van Sant] shoots with cut-outs, those kind of simple, free-floating cut-outs to convey the psychedelic scenes. It was one of my very first exposures to that style of filmmaking that was a lot more patient and took its time and allowed itself to breathe. And from there I got into, like Hal Hartley and the independent movies of the ’90s. But my love of that type of film all started with Drugstore Cowboy."