"Ah, the days when Hollywood harbored existentialistic realists, and the entirety of America—from its back roads and highway saloons to its hinterland betting subcultures, working-class desolation, gone-wild farm fields, and small-town cafeterias—was a metaphor for itself, and for all of our postwar lostness. Monte Hellman’s career peak is easily the greatest film I never even heard of as a film-hungry 1970s kid, vanished and hardly ever TV-broadcast, even as I thought the sobering, grown-up likes of Deliverance and Chinatown and Scarecrow were emblematic of an American cinema that had finally reached adulthood. Then came Star Wars."

"Another movie that I absolutely loved, and I am a massive Queen fan, was Bohemian Rhapsody. I watched it five times at the cinema, and I cried every time. I grew up on Queen; my mom fed me Alan Jackson, Queen, Roy Orbison – all these incredible artists – and that’s what I still listen too now. Rami Malek was incredible. Like, I know hard it is to talk with a mouth guard in my mouth trying to play sports, so trying to then talk with a mouth piece that he would have had to create the look of the big teeth. I was just blown away. It was pretty incredible."

"I remember the impact Lucrecia Martel’s debut feature had on film students, critics, and fellow filmmakers. It was released on one single 35 mm print in Brazil, and that was shredded over a period of a year after playing in just about all noncommercial movie theaters around the country. I love everything about this film: the obliqueness of it, the fresh and bold take on sexuality, the use of sound, the faces and bodies. It was also quite a reference for a filmmaker like me, who like Martel believed films could be about people interacting with a certain feeling of space and time, mediated by cinema itself."

"This came out right around the time that a new wave of Mexican filmmakers were making a splash on the global cinema market. It was a very exciting time, I think. And no film exemplifies that period to me more than Alfonso Cuarón’s beautifully intimate Y tu mamá también. It felt like he really captured Mexico, and the complexities of male friendship and intimacy. And those moments in our lives that change us forever. I just saw Roma at the Savannah Film Festival and was blown away. It feels like he’s come full circle. I see an artist really contemplating life, and it’s very inspiring."

"I guess because Werner Herzog might be the coolest man in the world. I like how he inserts himself into all of his stories. I’m a big fan of, I guess, “direct” cinema, but I don’t believe that a documentarian has to be a fly on the wall. That would be dull. I would listen to Herzog read anything. He could read the yellow pages. [On the influence of Herzog on Catfish] I guess just the basic instinct on our part just to be in our own films, to be a cameraman and a voice behind the camera and perhaps a character at times. We definitely get that from Herzog."

"Once Upon a Time in the West would come on the million-dollar movie. We had that once a week, I think, when everything was deployed on television. I had a [inaudible] television and I watched Once Upon a Time in the West, and I was blown away by the power in the stillness and silence of Charles Bronson as Harmonica, and I just thought the culmination of Morricone’s score with Leone’s gorgeous style, and then the showdown between Henry Fonda, who is outstanding as a bad guy, and Bronson was one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever experienced in cinema, and it really made a big impact."