"This is a film — and this is kind of going away from this relationship theme — but this is a film that, when I was little, I loved. I mean, I’ve loved it my whole life. I don’t know what that says about me, but I loved Sunset Boulevard. I was a big old-movie fan when I was, you know, older than most people should be when they’re older-movie fans. [Gloria Swanson is] just so spectacular in that film and it sort of formed my idea of that raw, dramatic acting. And the writing… The writing in that movie is unbelievable. So many incredible one-liners. It’s one of those movies that you can watch now and you’re just, like, “Damn, that was a good line,” you know? Like, God, that was some good writing back then. The thing is that movies written that way wouldn’t fit in, really, these days. It would sound strange, like you couldn’t really do it now. But thank God we have them."

"After film school, I moved to Chicago. The first thing I did when I arrived in town was get a membership at Facets, the legendary video store and cinematheque. My membership allowed me to see everything that showed at the cinema. About two years later, when they put on a Pialat retrospective, I took full advantage of the membership. I had already made a few small relationship movies, and the descriptions of the films seemed right up my alley. As with most of my favorite films, I had a negative initial reaction to a lot of what I saw. The characters were abrasive, and all seemed to be stuck in never-ending destructive cycles. There were unexplained jumps in time, and I often felt disoriented. I came away from the series with a mixed reaction. Now, years later, it’s easy for me to recognize the impact the films had on me because I can see it in my work. No other filmmaker has had such a direct and visible influence on me, and I didn’t even realize it as it was happening."

"You know, I’m gonna put this one in because it is actually one of my favorite films of all time, although technically it’s probably not a con man movie. The Man Who Would Be King. I did a Festival of Fakery. I did a little mini film festival which I kind of curated at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, and this was one of the movies that I showed. It’s about these two characters who do kind of go to pull off this con of pretending to be, you know, one of them pretends to be a god so that they can rule this small territory, basically. But as I watched it, it does actually, I don’t know, to me it does kind of play like a con man movie and also has the essential buddy relationship. The two rascals, I guess, standing back to back and fooling the world, which is reflected also in another one of the films in my list. This particular dynamic is probably my favorite."

"This whole album Live Through This is probably my favourite record of all time, I feel so empowered by it. I love Courtney Love, she’s a very unique, kind of controversial character who’s very outspoken, who does wild, weird things and has that guttural voice. And it’s still pop, the melodies are very singable. “It got me through a horrible break up. I listened to the album on repeat and I was ‘I can get through this, because Courtney Love has gotten through some crazy shit.’ I was angry for a lot of reasons, relationship stuff, music industry stuff, and it became my armour or something. ‘Violet’ was the song on that record that first made me go ‘Whoa.’ “Sometimes I think ‘Miss World’ is my favourite but ‘Violet’ broke down the door of how to be a screaming woman, I learnt to scream and sing differently from that. She opened up that world of ‘fuck off everyone and fuck what anyone thinks of you, I don’t care.’"