"Look at it this way: The Twilight Zone is your memories of growing up, of learning to understand a certain language of cinematic storytelling that embraces fantastic twists of plot and character. Then, when you’re older, and it occurs to you to ask your parents what things were really like back in the day, the answer is Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and The Comedian, all written by Rod Serling. Of course, there’s more than Serling’s writing to love here: the immediacy of the productions and the adrenaline of the performances make for a perfect record of this incredibly pivotal era of storytelling."

"Well, I think one thing is I love seeing the 15th century in black and white, in the 20th century. The physical imagery… that scene in the balloon at the beginning of the movie, the way that it’s cut together and the way that it functions and what he’s looking at. The sound, the music. Tarkovsky is one of my favorite directors and I think there’s just a great abstract quality in his films, where you see something and, as you’re looking at it, it transforms in front of your eyes. Things happen that you can’t believe you’re looking at — a horse falling down a flight of stairs; all of a sudden there’s a moment where you’ve got Christ, in the snow, carrying his cross up a hill. The kind of subliminal violence that occurs — when this guy gouges the eyes out of one of those journeymen, artisans that are leaving the reconstruction of a church; the apathy in the violence reminds me of the W.H. Auden poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts.” The old masters, they really knew about human suffering. And I guess in that particular film, what I’m thinking about is the length of the takes, and the surprise of what you actually see being filmed. The way slow motion is used in that movie also; the way that movies are not like that anymore. The scale and the depth of field of what you’re seeing is vast. So there’s a poetic quality to that. I’d have to mention The Passenger also, because there’s a moment when Antonioni has Jack Nicholson sticking his arms outside of a cable car, and for that moment you just have this sense of observing observation — that’s a big part of moviemaking to me, or painting. That kind of filmmaking, where the camera is still but everything around it is moving, and moving at different speeds, is something that I’m attracted to."