"I first saw two of my favorite personal documentaries in 1985 and 1986. Both greatly influenced me as a filmmaker. Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March offered up a neurotic self-portrait of the filmmaker’s pursuit of Southern women, while in God’s Country, Louis Malle visits with struggling farmers in Glencoe, Minnesota, a town an hour away from the Twin Cities, where I was born and raised. Sherman’s March has enjoyed far greater acclaim and exposure, but God’s Country is ultimately the more sophisticated film. These are both portraits of human pathos. But where McElwee depicts seemingly wacky Southern women with a palpable sense of disrespect for his subjects, Malle interacts with equally extreme characters in the North and manages to express a profound sense of respect and admiration, enabling us to feel sympathy for them and, ultimately, for ourselves. No disrespect to McElwee though: one of my favorite reviews of my film The Royal Road (by Bérénice Reynaud in Senses of Cinema) calls it “a sort of butch reply” to Sherman’s March."

"I love Hitchcock’s Rear Window. I’m actually developing a movie about Robert Capa, who was a war photographer that Hitchcock seemingly based the movie on. I used to take photographs; I was a photographer for many years, and I’m intrigued by this idea. I think it’s a wonderful idea about being a voyeur. He just watches his next door neighbors, and becomes convinced that one of them has been killed. It’s the idea of what you see versus what you really see. I loved making documentaries for that very reason; you just watch people, even after you’ve shot it. You go back to the edit suite and watch them, and you can understand when they’re telling the truth and when they’re lying. You get to know that stuff. It’s really fascinating — the idea that you can have a movie about something that might have happened… it’s a trick of the eye, or using the camera in a fascinating way. You’re using it to tell a story based on intrigue, and I don’t think I’ve seen that before, or since."

"I really like documentaries a lot; maybe more than film. I love this documentary called Hands on a Hard Body. It was made in the 1990s, I think. It’s about this annual event that takes place in Texas — it’s kind of like an endurance test of how long you can keep your hand on a truck. And if you are the last man standing, you get the truck. Literally, you just stand, day and night with your hand on a truck, and there’s like 15 or 20 people all standing there. And it’s such a well-done documentary. They feature each person before the program starts; the director comes in and he asks them questions like, “Why do you want to do this? Why do you want your truck?” and it’s just a real, unique look into people’s lives. It’s really powerful and it’s really moving and it’s kind of funny and odd and bizarre. It goes on for, I think, over 72 hours, and it’s really sad as you see this people dropping out. It says a lot about human endurance."