"In Gleaners And I, what’s around you is what you survive on – it’s a kind of contemporary foraging that they’re doing. I thought of that, and Agnes [Varda, the director] was on my mind because, A) she passed away when I was making a film, and B) they brought back a print of Vagabond before I was shooting. I was in New York and I saw Lady Bird and the theater was packed and there was so much hype about Lady Bird at that time. Then I walked up and I saw Vagabond in this not-so-full theater and saw a print of it. I thought, “Oh my God, the inventiveness of that film and the sort of circular motion of it and how she just decides to let people talk to the camera at a point, even though she’s in this narrative!” Anyway, just her confidence to be so inventive with narrative form. She’s so inspiring. How she moved in and out of documentary and narrative and how her docs have such narrative threads in them and her narratives… she just opens the door, and it’s like, “OK, now you’re going to talk to these real people that aren’t actors,” and she is just very fluid between those two. I admire those things about her work so much."

"#1 for sure is Blade Runner. I’ve been a big sci-fi geek since I was a little kid, and it was just done so well. It felt like that’s what Los Angeles was going to look like in the future, and you felt Harrison Ford’s turmoil as a blade runner. Everything about it was so real, and so cool, and everyone that was cast in it was so good in their roles, and so attractive. Even though the future looked spooky, it was also mesmerizing. Sean Young… Who knew she was so crazy? She was so great in that movie. And then when she finds out she’s a replicant, it’s so heartbreaking. I could watch that movie a hundred times and I don’t even care which version I see; I’m fine with the narration, I’m fine without the narration. It’s just a great movie. When you’ve seen it so many times, I guess it doesn’t matter. Like, it’s impossible for me to go back in time and see it for the first time without narration and see if it would have made it confusing or not, which, I guess, was the studio’s worry, that people wouldn’t be able to follow the storyline. But, you know, I’ll never know. [laughs] All I know is it’s the best science fiction movie ever made."

"Rick Rubin embraced Johnny Cash when he was floundering without a label. Rick thought this was unthinkable. He started soliciting writers beyond the country community and they did two great, odd, dark records. I wound up writing a song called 'I Witnessed A Crime' without knowing that Rick was going in this more contemporary vein. I later discovered it was too mid-’50s; too perfect for old-school Johnny Cash. So it didn't reach release until it was bootlegged out of the studio and found its way to YouTube. 

Rick called me up – I live just walking distance from house-to-house: ""Can you come over?"" I said, ""Well, you still got that old Fender guitar down there? If you let me play it I'll come on down."" He had this stunning Fender Esquire from 1954. I walked down and the door opened up, he ushered me into the living room and sitting on the sofa was Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. I was dumbfounded. So we sat down this close and he said, ""I like that song."" June started welling up and said, ""Ooh, you played the solo just like Luther Perkins."" I said, “Well, I'd like you to help me get through it.” We wound up singing it across the table. Little did I know that Rick had hidden microphones, capturing the whole thing."

"Frances, starring Jessica Lange, is one of those movies that for me was quite connected to my wanting to be an actor. I had obviously been to the movies many times as a young person, but I think I was about 14, or 15 when I was at home on a Sunday, and this movie … I turned a channel, and it was on cable, or whatever cable was at that time. And it was midway through the movie, and I just was transfixed and went out, back when we could go to the video store, and I rented it, so I could watch it from the beginning. And to me, it’s just an extraordinary portrait of an actress. Frances Farmer, I didn’t have knowledge about her and her work, but also whatever I knew of her working-wise, I certainly didn’t know anything about her real life, which is really tragic, and a painful movie to watch. Jessica Lange gives one of the greatest performances, and it was my introduction to Kim Stanley, who is actually the screensaver on one of my cell phones. [The pictures is] from her performance in Bus Stop, not from Frances; it’s just been on my phone for I don’t even know how long. And just again, there’s a thematic thread here [with Frances]: it’s another story about mother and daughter. At its core that’s what it’s about. And I just find it incredibly powerful. It was just like watching two acting titans and thinking, “Oh, if that’s what acting is, I want to do that.” And of course, I’ve come to learn that a lot of times acting doesn’t get to be that, but every once in a while you get to touch on that, and it was really inspiring – and another movie poster I had in house."

"Again, this song is totally inspiring from a production point of view. It’s hard to choose just one song from Les Paul and Mary Ford, but this stood out. It’s a great song, despite not being a Les Paul and Mary Ford original. When people think of Les Paul they tend to think of the guitar the Gibson Les Paul, but Les Paul basically invented multi-track recording and a lot of recording techniques that so many of us use today. The stuff that he did on ‘How High The Moon’ and anything from the early ‘50s is just so, so far ahead of its time. It’s all guitar, even the drums are just him tapping his guitar and not in a cheesy, Newton Faulkner kind of way, it’s serious musicality. He was basically recording in hotel rooms, using bathrooms as echo chambers and the like. The arrangement on this track is crazy. It is a bit silly, a lot of the stuff sounds silly because it’s all plinky-plonk, all very high-pitched, mandolin-like guitars, but you’ve got to remember this was in the ‘50s. It makes Rock ‘n’ Roll, which was often just three chords, sound very unimaginative. This kind of track was jazz chords and guitar orchestra, basically. I’ve definitely robbed some of Les Paul’s techniques over the last few years. On the new record there’s some sped-up guitar, half-time drums and things like that, where you basically slow down the tape and create a whole different instrument almost. If you haven’t seen [the Les Paul documentary] Chasing Sound, I highly recommend it. It’s about how he invented the first electric guitar, using a telephone microphone and putting it on a bit of old railway track, putting and stretching a string across it and amplifying it. That was literally the birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll."