"I enjoy reading epic stories from ancient history and in recent years have been reading abridged versions aloud to my kids. This epic poem was found on a series of ancient tablets from Mesopotamia written down over 4,000 years ago, and involves the central character Gilgamesh, an excessive and oppressive leader, and his arduous journey in pursuit of the secrets of immortality. His character evolves through his personal voyage towards accepting death, and you encounter so many tales that you recognize from history."

"Tarkovsky is my hero, and the hero of Russian cinema—a man who found a way to make transcendent, transgressive films that went beyond his political circumstances and captured something far more primordial and enigmatic about the world itself. For this and many other reasons, he’s considered to be one of the great directors in cinema history, which is no small feat for a Soviet artist. If you’re a newcomer to his films, start with Ivan’s Childhood and go from there."

"Okay, I’m going to do a hybrid again. Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle and Playtime; I’m going to put those two together. One’s sort of spun off the other, in a way, but you could put either, because it’s really about Tati himself, and the conceptual art of his films. The film that has almost no dialogue, just gibberish and music and human behavior, and staging. Competition is staging, which I found fascinating. They seduce you into paying attention to the simplest of details."

"Okay, I’m going to do a hybrid again. Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle and Playtime; I’m going to put those two together. One’s sort of spun off the other, in a way, but you could put either, because it’s really about Tati himself, and the conceptual art of his films. The film that has almost no dialogue, just gibberish and music and human behavior, and staging. Competition is staging, which I found fascinating. They seduce you into paying attention to the simplest of details."

"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."

"I sang this song, a capella, at a talent show and won three weeks in a row. As a young African-American woman, I found the lyrics resonated with me, because I was still trying to find out who I was, what I wanted to say and how I was going to make music. Everything she says in the song helped shape my early thoughts. She hasn’t made an album in a long time, but that’s cool — I’ll be here waiting."