"""I could go on forever with the list, so I just picked five random ones, because I go through periods where I watch certain movies a lot. I don’t know why — I’ll get on a kick. I’ve been on a kick lately of watching Dracula, the 1931 version with Bela Lugosi, over and over and over and over. You know? I love everything from the ’30s. The 1930s is my absolute favorite time period for horror movies, because they were just so demented and sick. Sometimes you watch them and go, “Wow, they get away with a lot.” Then, of course, the codes came in and it ruined the party. When you watch movies from the 1940s, they seem so tame and so dry, but everything from the ’30s is just amazing. Lugosi in that film is so iconic, he doesn’t even seem like an actor giving a performance. Some of these people transcend to something else. It’s like Marilyn Monroe or something. They became something else. Sometimes people will make fun of his performance because of his accent, but he’s so… It’s so funny. I love watching him, because his performances are so unique. Sometimes there’s other people in the film — like David Manners, who’s like the lead, good-looking guy, and he’s so wooden and so 1930s-stiff acting, and Lugosi seems like Brando. You can see he’s so in it that when they yelled, “Cut!,” he didn’t cut. You can just see it. He’s so committed that his performance is funny, because it’s on such another level from anyone else in the film. Everybody in those movies back then, you watch them and it’s just — it’s that feeling like, “Eh, you know, even though they’re supposed to be boyfriend/girlfriend, husband/wife, they don’t [seem] like they’re having sex or something.” Lugosi seems like he wants to f— everything in the movie constantly. He just has that vibe. Really weird, man. You know? He does, essentially, I guess. Yeah, he does. He’s just not tame. I don’t know, maybe because he was Hungarian or whatever, he just has a different way of approaching, but he does not have that “uptight American actor from the ’30s” vibe at all. He just steals every moment. Not just him; Dwight Frye as Renfield is amazing. It’s funny — actors seem like they don’t want to do these types of movies, but as soon as you play a villain in something that’s like a horror movie, that’s what you’re going to be remembered for. Even if Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar for whatever — Remains of the Day or Howard’s End or I can’t even remember what it was — he’s Hannibal Lecter. Doesn’t matter if Jack Nicholson won an Oscar for Cuckoo’s Nest or whatever; he’s Jack Torrance. It’s so funny, these roles are just so — they stick."""

"Now I just said I don’t like slasher movies, but this is the exception to that rule — because it’s the exception to horror movies. The Rob Zombie remake of Halloween — that thing is f**king genius. It’s like he violates every rule of horror movie making and makes it work. Most horror movies are atmospheric, they’re really dark or they’re at night and they’re creepy; his is taking place in bright noon sunshine daylight, out in the yard. And the way he goes into the story of the Michael Myers character, you know, the reason why he’s making all these masks. That is a great movie. I guess I also like it because of the outside scenes. You know, when they show people walking down the sidewalk or something — it feels like Autumn. You see leaves skitter across the sidewalk as the wind blows ’em, and you feel Halloween when you’re watching ’em. I remember the first time I saw that was when we were in prison. They’ll show movies on holidays just to take the tension out of the air a little bit — and that was the movie we got to see on Christmas. On Christmas they showed us Halloween. And when it was over — it was Christmas night, about 9 o’clock — as soon as it went off I went into such a deep state of mourning, because it was like my favorite time of year was gone. From the Equinox to Christmas morning, that is like the richest, most velvety, delicious time of year. People always ask me, you know, they would say, “How would you describe heaven — in this perfect atmosphere where everything is exactly how you wanted it, how would it be?” And I say, “It would always be December.” So I realized that time of year was over, it was gone, and I was going to have to wait all the way around the will of the year to get back to Autumn and Halloween again. And seeing it in that movie, I just sat down and started crying when it was over, because I realized I was gonna have to make it through another long, hot, brutal summer, you know — prison guards torturing you, there’s nothing to look forward to. It was a horrible feeling. It feels like there’s a hole in you or something. But I can watch that movie now, and automatically feel that time of year again."

"I can say that, in thinking about it, I was thinking five favorite-ish movies that seemed to be relatively inspiring to me as a filmmaker or something like that. One is a movie called Bad Taste by Peter Jackson. The reason that movie is one of my favorite films is because… two things. One, I saw it when I was very young because it had a very sort of provocative box cover of an alien giving you the middle finger, in the video store; that was very charming to me. It seemed like something that needed to be rented for a sleep over. It’s one of the grossest movies ever, so it was always the benchmark of, like, “Is there a more disgusting movie than this?” And also not a lot of people had seen it so it was like a badge of honor. But more importantly, when I decided that maybe movies was something I wanted to do, that movie was actually the first movie that I think made me think I could maybe do this. Because it was the first time I’d ever seen a movie where I realized how the movie was made. And I realized, “He’s just putting a camera on the back of the car;” “Oh, that’s just him with his friend doing this;” and, “I can see how he built that effect” or “I can see how he used ketchup for blood” or whatever. It was so rough around the edges, yet still compelling and well-made that it kind of gave me this sort of inspiration and confidence to be like, “All I have to do is go do it, like this guy just went and did it.” So that movie is, like, the number one movie that made me think, “Maybe I can try this.”"

"The first one would be Souls For Sale, which was actually written and directed by Howard Hughes’ uncle, Rupert Hughes. It was based on a novel that Rupert Hughes wrote. He had been an author and a playwright and he had been brought to Hollywood in 1918 as sort of an effort that Samuel Goldwyn did to bring famous authors into the movies to try increase the qualities of movies. Rupert Hughes had just fallen in love with Hollywood and once it started being attacked after the scandals of the 1920s, he wanted to defend what he felt was an industry that was getting a bad rap. He wrote this novel and they made a movie out of it called Souls For Sale, and it’s about the daughter of a fire-and-brimstone preacher who escapes her brand new husband, who she has a bad feeling about, and ends up in a movie and immediately becomes a huge star. It basically tells the story of this girl encountering the movie industry, and at every moment where something sort of dirty or scandalous could happen, she actually finds that the people in Hollywood are really hard-working and upstanding citizens and are a higher quality of human than – for instance – her treacherous husband. It’s a really interesting movie. It’s definitely an artifact of its time and place – and you could say that more literally about it than many other movies because it has kind of a documentary element about it. The director really goes out of his way to show you what the studio lots looked like in 1923, and he films other directors like Charlie Chaplin working. It’s a movie that I had never heard of before as I was doing research [for the book], and I think it’s probably the earliest sort of Hollywood movie about Hollywood."