"War of the Gargantuas was something I just thought was so fantastical and so bizarre that it is my favorite of Honda’s movies, but the effects look great, and all the little toys, and it was just something that transported me. I can lose myself in that movie, and I love the brothers warring, and it has kind of like a personal feeling for me."

"Ah that's the one, unfortunately, Lou Reed hated. He couldn't stand it... but I liked it! There's such a variety of songs on it. There's one song on there - [line cuts out; we reconnect] - I told you Lou Reed hated that album! That song 'Who Loves The Sun', how good is that?! The breakdown on it, it's like a hoedown. They called it an album, but this is just an art project! A lost memo for an album... Let's come up with 16 ideas and just whittle it down. 'I Found A Reason', that song, the melody [imitates it] that was just amazing. 'Rock & Roll', I first heard that in my father's car. He had a Monte Carlo, and I thought that was cool. It came on the radio and I was like, "What is this?!" It was so simple and it was talking about a radio station in New York - and I was in New York, that was where I heard it - and I just loved the rhythm guitar and also the soaring chorus, where it's just like three notes and it kind of soars around. And that became an influence on our song called 'Ed Is Dead' - another homage!"

"It’s part of New York Stories, with Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette. Nolte plays Lional Dobie, this Jackson Pollack-like artist. I love the subject matter of Life Lessons, it’s just great. Scorsese completely captures the obsession with women, visually and in the storyline. And Nick Nolte is never better — his performance is just f**king unbelievable. He’s on top of his game stylistically, Scorsese, melding heavy style with story without it ever feeling like you’re just watching a director, you know, show off. I never felt that. I’d be curious to see what he thinks of that movie, or how much time he spent doing it, but to me it just felt like kind of an effortless exercise in his talent."

"Another one is Tetsuo: The Ironman, directed by Shin’ya Tsukamoto. To me that’s up there. That’s up there for me. I’d say the whole Tetsuo series, just because it’s such a beautifully handcrafted movie. You can tell there’s so much in it. I love that kind of, you know, like the early Tim Burtons and the David Lynches and all that stuff. There’s something about this Shin’ya Tsukamoto stuff. It was just at the perfect time when cyber-punk — what cyber-punk looked like — he was one of those people kind of establishing that. And whether people know it or not, Tetsuo: The Ironman was just hugely influential on everything, on sci-fi after that. It became like a design resource for everybody f—ing with sci-fi. You know, people have seen these images without even knowing the movie. It’s really, really awesome. I just think about it still, like, “How did they do that with no money, really? How did they pull this s— off and build these amazing effects?” They had to redub all the audio because there was no audio when they filmed it. There were a lot of elements against them too, but they pulled it off and it’s still just so amazing. I just hope to do a fraction of that with my own film."

"Funky Forest. It’s a Japanese movie. It’s kind of like a patchwork film, kind of like Kuso is, in a way. I think it was heavily influential in just like, “OK well, it doesn’t all have to be … It can feel more like a short film, but in the same world, in an absurd world.” I think it was really, really inspiring for me. It had a lot of body comedy in that movie, a lot of really cool prosthetic effects that mixed with CGI, I think. It’s one of the movies where people will just be like, “What the f— is this? What is this?” And it’s not perfect movie, but it is, at times, perfect."

"I loved Pan’s Labyrinth. It transported me into another world. I like fantasy worlds; I love Lord of the Rings as well, for that reason, because you really get to get out of reality and go somewhere else. Pan’s Labyrinth was kind of this dark, sick, beautiful… it was like watching a moving painting, like a Salvador Dali painting or something like that. It was just really magical and it sort of provoked so many different feelings at one time. It’s kind of sick, you know, the guy with no eyes is coming at her and it felt like when you have a crazy dream — you’re watching someone’s crazy dream. It just affected me."