"I saw Pan’s Labyrinth when it played at the New York Film Festival, and it was a euphoric experience. That movie was just the best. I watched it four or five times in the theater. One time I was in Mexico with my family and I was wandering around the streets and saw that it was playing at a theater and I went in. I don’t speak very good Spanish, but the movie worked so well without me knowing what anybody was saying because the visual storytelling is so incredible. We watched it a lot as a reference on We the Animals."

"I discovered Christopher Isherwood in college. His writing style is so direct, warm, and inclusive. There's one passage in this book, published in 1964, that has really stayed with me — the description of America. The narrator is a British man teaching at a California college. He and a few colleagues are having a conversation, and an American woman is saying how romantic Mexico is. She's critical of America. The protagonist argues with her, talking about the virtues of the United States. He says that its beauty is in its abstraction. I thought that was an amazing insight — possibly true and compelling at least."

"I was living a little bit of this story in real time, because the film came out while I was living on the border, reporting on drug trafficking in Northern Mexico for the Associated Press. (I was also dating the journalist consultant to the film, a reporter for the New York Times.) The filmmakers got it right. They captured the resignation that countless families caught in the narco racket feel: plata o plomo. Benicio del Toro is magnificent as a doomed local cop, and his performance is as understated and sure-footed as anything I’ve ever seen him in since."

"This came out right around the time that a new wave of Mexican filmmakers were making a splash on the global cinema market. It was a very exciting time, I think. And no film exemplifies that period to me more than Alfonso Cuarón’s beautifully intimate Y tu mamá también. It felt like he really captured Mexico, and the complexities of male friendship and intimacy. And those moments in our lives that change us forever. I just saw Roma at the Savannah Film Festival and was blown away. It feels like he’s come full circle. I see an artist really contemplating life, and it’s very inspiring."