"I love Cassavetes and many of his films have had a great influence on me. He has made the most impressive female portraits, and Gena Rowlands, who was always so incredible, intimate, explosive, and vibrant, has been an inspiration. A Woman Under the Influence has one of the most incredible female performances in modern cinema; it feels so real that it hurts. She is so vulnerable, it feels like you’re watching someone’s actual existence. Everything seems so free and wild and organic. It’s like looking at a Fauvist painting—it looks easy and natural, but the amount of energy that’s in the film is something that’s hard to capture. Anyone who has been involved in filmmaking knows that it is almost impossible to get to those levels of truth."

"Ives's 114 Songs has been a major source of inspiration for me (particularly for my 69 Love Songs and 50 Song Memoir). But that wasn't all he wrote: from 1887 to 1926 Ives wrote 193 songs, and here they all are on six CDs: lullabies, Christmas carols, German operetta emulations, mortal laments, parlor ballads, cowboy dirges, and even election-day commentary on 'Nov. 2, 1920 (An Election)', and 'Vote for Names! Names! Names!', of which Ives says, ""The [three] pianos represent three political candidates, each uttering his own 'hot air slogan'; the singer represents the disillusioned voter."" The texts come 80% from poets (Keats, Kipling, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and many anonymous sources) and 20% from Ives himself, whose aw-shucks Americana (as on 'Slugging A Vampire') and gleefully jarring harmonies keep the surprises genuinely surprising. "