"""When it comes to documentaries, I am not a fan of current trends of reenactments and celebrities reading the words of unavailable subjects. Skip the elaborately constructed interstitial animations and give me old-school talking heads and archival footage with scripted, voice-of-God narration to help move me where you want me to go. The Times of Harvey Milk is what I’m talking about. Winner of the 1985 Oscar for Best Documentary, Rob Epstein and Richard Schmiechen’s powerful account of the assassination of San Francisco’s first openly gay elected official remains one of the most riveting documentaries ever made. It tells the story of San Francisco’s gay community and the fight for gay rights in the late 1970s through dynamic talking-head interviews, gripping archival footage, and devastating narration by Harvey Fierstein. It is also one of the very few gay-themed films to be selected for the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry."

"This was really important to me as a teenager. I was 15 and my friend put these headphones on me - I think I've talked about this in other interviews. It's embarrassing because I always say the same thing. But anyway he put these headphones on me and he had Live-Evil on his Walkman, and it just blew my mind. It was this culmination of wild instruments. It was just the funkiness, the wildness - it was all so beautiful. There was crazy trumpet on top of funky bass. I had never heard Miles Davis before so it was a crazy thing to hear for the first time. It really inspired my sense of exploration. I was listening to avant-garde classical music - which I never listen to anymore - and I was really interested in dissonance and wildness. So this seemed to be about letting yourself go and not worrying about, or being restricted by, style."

"Timothy Hutton turns in one of the best male performances I’ve ever seen. And that family dynamic was so subtle in what could have been a really angsty movie. Everything from the way it was shot to the way it was acted. John Bailey was actually the DP on my movie that I directed (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) and he was saying that when they shot the psychiatrist scenes he started out with the camera right over their shoulders, and then he moved the camera back slowly and changed the lighting, because he said that if you’d been going to therapy for months, then the lighting would be different every time of the same day. And I thought, “That’s insane that someone thought of that.” And then he moved the camera back 100 feet so that they were compressed on each other so it was a much more intimate scene. I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, this is insane!”"