"In Gleaners And I, what’s around you is what you survive on – it’s a kind of contemporary foraging that they’re doing. I thought of that, and Agnes [Varda, the director] was on my mind because, A) she passed away when I was making a film, and B) they brought back a print of Vagabond before I was shooting. I was in New York and I saw Lady Bird and the theater was packed and there was so much hype about Lady Bird at that time. Then I walked up and I saw Vagabond in this not-so-full theater and saw a print of it. I thought, “Oh my God, the inventiveness of that film and the sort of circular motion of it and how she just decides to let people talk to the camera at a point, even though she’s in this narrative!” Anyway, just her confidence to be so inventive with narrative form. She’s so inspiring. How she moved in and out of documentary and narrative and how her docs have such narrative threads in them and her narratives… she just opens the door, and it’s like, “OK, now you’re going to talk to these real people that aren’t actors,” and she is just very fluid between those two. I admire those things about her work so much."

"Another time travel movie, as I call it. I love the pacing of the film and how strange it was. When I saw it I just fell into the reality of the movie, just seeing him get on the train and head out to this place that he’s not excited about going to, and then getting there and being trapped by the forces of nature. Again, for me, some films just have an immersive atmosphere—and the music, and all the shots, the period that’s it’s in, and the casting, it just really transported me to that time period. And I love Sigourney Weaver. I’ve seen other things that she’s been in, but for the most part I think of her as the, you know, Alien. So to see her in something that I was excited about, and just as a character, that was great. But it was a very transporting movie. If a piece is going to take place in the past, I want it to feel like that, whatever that means. If the details aren’t right, it will take me out of the movie. And with The Ice Storm I just fell into that reality so hard-core. I just remember it being like, “Oh my god.” I think I saw it twice because I worked in the movie theater at that time and saw it for free."

"This was the first Powell film I ever saw. I saw it when it first came to New York, where it played for only a few days in its initial run, or so I figured when I tried to go back and see it again. I fell in love with that film, partly because of where it took place, partly because of who was in it, partly because of the way the music slipped in and out of it, and mostly because I could see that Michael Powell, whoever he was, was my leader. Years later, when I finally met him (I was trying to make The Riddle of the Sands with him, but couldn’t raise the money), I spent an entire lunch recalling all his lines from I Know Where I’m Going! In the face of my slavish foolishness, I remember he was most gracious."

"I saw this film in college when I was first studying screenwriting and starting out as a comic. It has forever been imprinted in my DNA. It’s funny, it’s emotional, and it’s unafraid. I was so struck when I saw it that it found the beauty in a breakup as opposed to wallowing in it. It also traffics in an area so specific — a neurotic, Jewish comedian — but yet it feels so universal. Woody Allen does this in all of his films of that period: Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors. But this one truly makes me laugh the most and get choked up in the same moment. It also has the line that my wife repeats to me all the time, which is the mother’s line to the child Alvy when he asks what they’ll do about the universe expanding: “WHAT, IS THAT YOUR BUSINESS?!”"

"That’s one of my favorites. That one is on my list, too. When I saw it, it just blew me away completely. I saw it when I was quite young, and I remember thinking, “My god, are these really actors? Could a movie be done this way?” It was something I’d never seen before, and it was so brutal and so real; just like watching a documentary. Those kinds of filmmakers and actors kind of opened up things in me that gave me hope and inspired me. I felt less lonely in a way, because I thought, “Okay, there’s people out there exploring things that I would like to do.” People who were not afraid of darkness; people who were not afraid of going into things that were not charming and easy and, you know, sweet and cute. That one made a very strong impression on me."

"Escape From New York, because that’s the one that made me want to make movies. It was a fantasy world. It was like, “What? There’s a wall around New York? It’s a prison? You can do that? You can just make stuff like that up?” That’s a lot of freedom; I thought that was very freeing. I was twelve when I saw that, twelve or thirteen. And I saw that [John Carpenter] wrote it, directed it, and did the music, and I was just like, “This guy’s doing everything. You can do that?” It just felt like, it was so renegade. It was independently done, and it made me want to start making movies, and I started making movies from that point on. It was just very inspiring. I knew I had a lot of interest, and that made me… That was movie that just really marked my life."