"I actually first discovered a lot of the films on this list, like News from Home, when I lived in New York, next to Kim’s Video, a time when I went a lot to Anthology Film Archives and Lincoln Center. Chantal Akerman has always been a big inspiration for me, and News from Home was the first film of hers that I saw. Watching it was so inspiring and made me feel like I could make movies myself, because it’s so simply done yet so affecting—just letters and an empty city. I have a very strong relationship with my mother, and she also used to send me letters when I lived in New York. I discovered Jeanne Dielman later, and a lot of the screen tests I did for Invisible Life were taken from frames from that film."

"The first one with Brandon Lee. The whole set — it was a really cool set — I liked the whole vibe of it with the martial arts. I was a Brandon Lee fan, and that was a fairly bad-ass movie. That whole Hell’s Kitchen vibe in New York — that whole realm just has this cool mystifying vibe. It looked like it would be a fun set."

"There’s a film called Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring. I saw it at the Angelika on my birthday in New York, maybe ten years ago? It never left me — it’s such a good film. It’s tremendous and beautiful. There’s like twelve words in the whole thing. It’s about a floating monastery in the middle of a lake. There’s like three people in it. That was amazing."