"I’m a film school nerd, so I’ve got about a hundred favorite movies. I’d feel like I was cheating on all of them if I narrowed it down to five movies. But con man movies I can do. In no particular order, I guess the first one I’d name is Paper Moon, which, for me, is just a perfect film. It’s also one of the first con man movies I saw that was less about the mechanics of plot and more about the relationships between the characters, and this father-daughter relationship, which is really beautiful. Just a pretty wonderful movie."

"“I’m not typically interested in poetry, but I discovered The Flowers of Evil in high school as I was just becoming a goth and getting into Trent Reznor – and everyone else was getting into the Beat poets, who I find comparably boring if we’re going to discuss druggy, surrealist poetry. This work is so visceral, filthy and gorgeously written. It feels like a distillation of the opium scenes from Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, but more abstract and extensively documented. This one poem is just a disgusting, sexual description of a corpse that is permanently burned into my mind.”"

"That’s another great sprawling big epic that follows various episodes in the life of Andrei Rublev, who was an icon painter in probably the 15th or 16th century — I’m not sure — and just various episodes in his life. I mean, he hardly features in many of them. He’s just an observer of a lot of this, but it’s magnificent. You really, really get a feel for what it might have been like to live in medieval Russia. It’s much more approachable than some of [Andrei] Tarkovsky‘s work. I absolutely adore it and watch it again and again."