"I got this in sixth grade. First of all, the artwork, with those two mannequins sitting at a table, was so weird. That by itself puts it into a class of its own, because most of the other records in my collection just had pictures of pop stars. The songwriting was so beautiful and so simple and so strong, but I was also really compelled by Alison Moyet's voice. Still to this day, I generally don't like chick singers – their high squeaky voices irritate me! But Alison Moyet, sort of like Laurie Anderson, had this really beautiful, growly, rough, bluesy, believable voice. When she sang, I just bought every second of it. I believed her. And the tracks are catchy as all get out. 'In My Room' is one of my favourite songs of all time – the band and I are working on a cover of it. I'm tracing back the genealogy of my new record, and it's in those early Yazoo records, along with Soft Cell and The Cars... what they were able to do with a couple of synthesisers and really simple chord changes, great melodies and believable delivery."

"Of course, I love Raging Bull. And I love The Godfather. [Laughs] Maybe I need to find something a little fresher. But Raging Bull, you can always feel when an actor kind of goes into — I don’t know Robert De Niro, but I kind of get this feeling that he went really deep into it, and that the character and he melded together. I can feel like he’s not pretending. He’s actually living it. That’s always something that hits me, and I forget about the outside world; it’s almost like the movie I’m watching takes over and becomes my reality. I’ve seen Raging Bull so many times and it feels so pure and real. It’s beautiful and sexy and rough, and there’s so much pain in it at the same time. I think it always attracts me, you know, with people struggling and people fighting and people wanting to become something, wanting to change their lives or change who they are; people fighting with their own demons. For me, that’s such a beautiful example of that — someone who was really focused on being something, and becoming something, and how hard it is and how much you need to fight."

"I love all of Bergman’s films, but his later period has had the biggest impact on me, starting with Persona. The film marked the advent of a new period for him; I know that he wrote it when he was in the hospital and thought he was going to die. It adopts a dream logic in a really forward-thinking way, and like Altman’s Three Women, is an example of a proto-Lynchian dream movie. I was thinking about that when we were making Hereditary, how it gradually adopts a nightmare logic. Cries and Whispers strikes me as the most painful and beautiful film about death . . . and sisterhood. I screened it for the crew when we were making Hereditary, which is also a movie about suffering. Bergman was always wrestling with the big things—family dynamics, one’s relationship to God—but he did it in such an accessible way. His films are entertainments—they’re fun, and they’re beautiful. I feel like he has a reputation for being a forbidding director, but I find him to be as inviting as a filmmaker like that could possibly be."

"I love all of Bergman’s films, but his later period has had the biggest impact on me, starting with Persona. The film marked the advent of a new period for him; I know that he wrote it when he was in the hospital and thought he was going to die. It adopts a dream logic in a really forward-thinking way, and like Altman’s Three Women, is an example of a proto-Lynchian dream movie. I was thinking about that when we were making Hereditary, how it gradually adopts a nightmare logic. Cries and Whispers strikes me as the most painful and beautiful film about death . . . and sisterhood. I screened it for the crew when we were making Hereditary, which is also a movie about suffering. Bergman was always wrestling with the big things—family dynamics, one’s relationship to God—but he did it in such an accessible way. His films are entertainments—they’re fun, and they’re beautiful. I feel like he has a reputation for being a forbidding director, but I find him to be as inviting as a filmmaker like that could possibly be."

"I was in college. I had the chicken pox so I had to stay in my dorm room. I wasn’t even sick. I had like two pox. Not like the rapper, but like two pox, and I had all this energy, and I was like [makes sick noise], and I watched Hannah and Her Sisters with two other friends of mine in the dorm that had already had chicken pox, so they could be around me. I’d never seen filmmaking like that, although, in high school, I watched New York Stories by Woody Allen, which I also was a big fan already, so I was like, “Oh, this is great.” I feel like Hannah and Her Sisters was just a beautiful film. Such a beautiful film. The work that he gets out of the actors… He casts these amazing actors, but then he gets these phenomenal performances out of them. There’s so much vulnerability in that movie that it just struck me. It was like an amazing artistic truck just running me over. I was already studying acting and knew I wanted to do that, but it really, really landed on me."