"I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, and he talks about the concept of 10,000 hours. That you don't really settle into any level of mastery until 10,000 hours, and I feel like I've just completed my 10,000 hours of story structure and filmmaking."

"We will switch gears completely, and I will say the original Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn, which really influenced my style. Just driving up with her trunks of luggage on the back of the car… it was just such a beautiful film. The clothing, I just was like, whoa. The elegance of it, the time period, the black-and-whiteness of it, the cast. It’s just one of those classic films that kind of etched a place in my aesthetics of style and elegance."

"""And then I always think the Pixar film is always the best film of the year. Always. I just think they are amazing. Last year, I thought Coco was the film of the year. Those films are just brilliant, like Wall-E or Up, and you say, “How did they ever get that made? How did they ever get that past somebody?” I don’t know what’ll happen with Lassiter not there, but I’m a big animation fan. But I would say if I had to pick favorites, probably some of the Miyazaki films, those animated films. Spirited Away maybe. They’re just art. He is head and shoulders above everybody, and he said he was retiring. He’s like 86 or something. Then I just read he’s making a new film. Yeah, probably Spirited Away. It’s got 17 different styles of art in it. It just keeps changing. You just keep getting blown away. You can’t believe what you’re seeing"""

"In more recent years, I decided if I was going to play acoustic punk music I wasn’t going to be the guy that just bangs on a guitar. I wanted to learn how to play guitar and use it to dictate what I needed to say, as well as my lyrics. So I took online lessons to learn about finger picking and I learnt Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits, note for note. I think it’s one of the most beautiful love songs in the world, and I love the fact that he doesn’t even sing it. He just talks it. I adore Mark Knopfler for that. He seems so unaffected in this song. He didn’t care about Wham! or Oingo Boingo or whatever was popular at the time. He just said, ‘I’m singing like this and I’m finger picking because that’s what I love.’ That goes right back to Bob Dylan for me: from Just Like a Woman to Romeo and Juliet. And when I finally learn how to play that song note for note I’m going to play it for people."

"The reason I love it is it’s the ultimate adaptation. You know, memes coming out in your films. This guy makes a film every two, three years, is making, making, making, and all the money goes away and they come to him and they say, “Okay, you can make it for TV. You can make whatever you want,” and he walks up to a building complex and he goes right, The Ten Commandments in that building. How do you do that? He makes 10 movies in a year — three of them I think they released later on as features. And you look at them and they have the balls of a student movie, like a short film about killing. It’s just all about the process. It isn’t about hanging the guy or not hanging the guy, it’s just what it takes to hang a guy. And just stuff like that, that I just think, “How do you do that?” I don’t think it’ll ever happen — at least in my lifetime."

"There’s so much great stuff in the Song Poems catalogue, but Rod Keith is a favourite of mine. Everybody has their own favourite catalogue, but ‘Little Rug Bug', that song was great. All the songs with Rodd Keith doing the chamberlain thing with a pretend orchestra on a chamberlain are amazing. It’s a keyboard with string samples built into it. It’s like a Melotron. You kind of hear it on ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Flying’ on Magical Mystery Tour. It just has an unreal quality to it, with an orchestra that’s just on some fuckin' weird boogie-woogie drug. It’s like Harry Merry in a way. It just sounds like a malfunctioning pre-set."

"That was one of those movies I saw and it’s… I’m sure that there are movies that are more important, you know? But it was one of those movies that I saw, and it was just perfect, if that makes sense. It’s like all movies are like listening to a bunch of different instruments playing at the same time, and suddenly they all sync up for certain moments, and there’s other times where it’s not quite in rhythm. JCVD was just bang-on the entire time. It was just so lean and solid and this perfect blend of dark humor and some really genuinely touching moments. That moment when he goes up into the loft and it’s all very surreal, and he’s crying, I was like, “This is for real, man. This has really got me.” It’s such a beautiful thing when you’re watching a movie and if somebody told you, “Oh, he’s about to start crying and you’re about to get really emotional in five minutes,” that you would go “No way. Come on, it’s not that kind of movie,” or it’s gonna feel really forced and it’s not gonna work, and they manage to take you there. That’s so impressive."