"The Wong Kar-wai movie. If you haven’t seen it, you must. It’s beautiful, and romantic, and sexy, and impossibly romantic — did I mention? The imagery and the lighting is gorgeous. It’s a DP’s [director of photography] dream. I think I’m a sucker for images. I don’t really need the words as much as I just want beautiful pictures of places I’ve never been and things I’ve never seen."

"This series of conversations between the painter Francis Bacon and the writer David Sylvester shaped my thinking about art and creativity, and I’ve read it over and over. The words are precise, profound and relevant. Reading what Bacon says about the game of painting in the face of film and photography helped me navigate a way to make figurative painting today. Every time I read them I feel energized and compelled to paint."

"La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini, who I’m sure you’re familiar with. And again, not the formula. He was incredible at expressing himself in a way that no other filmmaker could get away with. You see these sequences that may or may not be related. [laughs] Somehow, at the end of it all, it all makes sense, and you’re floored. The photography, and the shots, and the choreography can stand up to anything that’s been released up to now."

"I saw this film when it first came out in the very early ’60s. It’s a chronicle of a decadent society full of Fellini’s incredibly inventive and imaginative imagery. It’s the story of a Roman journalist struggling between producing something meaningful in his life and drifting along a path of total emptiness. I was very young when I saw the film. I was completely inspired by the combination of such beautiful photography and the sad and powerful story."

"Kelly Reno gives one of the three greatest performances by a kid (next to Anna Paquin in The Piano and Victoire Thivisol in Ponette). Watch him be his own stuntman on an island with no hospital, a production with no net. Kelly Reno is a beast of an actor, and then controls beasts himself. The present crop of abs-obsessed, fake-tough actors should tremble before him. Director of photography Caleb Deschanel shoots this movie effortlessly but still drenches it in beauty."