"I first song I remember loving had to be ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?’ by Culture Club and so I guess I figured out I was an emo pretty early on in my life! But I really just connected with that song when I was a kid. For one, I was taken back by this man’s look, is that a girl or a boy? I was intrigued at that moment, but the song itself is a really good song. A lot of Culture Club’s music had sort of a reggae feel to it and at that point I had never heard reggae music and it sort of felt other-worldly in a way."

"This is an amazing film, so visually stunning and strange and melancholic. It’s a good film to remind me of a time period that I was living at that time; it made me feel very heavy, you know, as a kid in 1985. I would have been twelve or thirteen, and it was just a formative time of existence. It affected me in a pretty intense way, just simply by its mood alone. Terry Gilliam’s imagination was so surreal and rich. And the propulsion of the story with the atmosphere in this world, and the gadgets and inventions and trials that all these characters have to go through, it’s a fantastic voyage of the mind."

"One of my favorite films is the movie Tootsie. I really love Tootsie. I just watched it when I was a kid and for some reason, I just, I’m obsessed with that movie. I think I’ve watched it 100 times. It’s just so funny and fun, and I love it. It’s cool. I like that it’s sort of about women, you know? It’s sort of about how he finds the woman inside himself, so there’s sort of like this feminine aspect to it, and I just love Dustin Hoffman. He’s amazing. I don’t know, I just love that movie. It’s emotionally totally satisfying to me, and it sort of makes me feel good while being interesting and smart."

"It’s dramatically different [from The Godfather] in terms of this town and the world of it. It’s a good movie, tremendously. I’m a writer, so obviously I enjoy the content because it’s about writer things and writer dramas and writer people. It’s just one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. I can watch that movie over and over again. Robert Downey Jr. gives one of his best performances ever. And very funny. And I love Michael Douglas in it; he’s great. But it also has this wonderful capacity for pathos in this very earned way. It doesn’t feel kitsch. It feels really earned and honest, so it can play those lines really well."