"When I was a kid I saw My Name Is Joe in the theater. I’d never seen anybody act like Peter Mullan before and I’d never seen a movie like that, period. Watching Mullan in that movie I was just like, how do you do that? How do you get actors to do that? After that I watched every Ken Loach movie I could. Kes is one of my favorite movies ever. The plot of We the Animals is very smiliar to Kes; we follow the same formula. In fact, the entire last third of our movie is completely ripped off from the end of Kes and follows almost beat by beat the storytelling of that film."

"I love that movie. I worked with him [director François Truffaut], but I remember seeing that movie long before. I didn’t even know it was such a fantastic film for everybody. When I saw it for the first time I thought, “I’m actually looking through a window back to the 1920s Paris.” Everything I love about that era. I met Truffaut and I was with him for about six months on Close Encounters and I realized suddenly that he had done 400 Blows which is really the story of my life as a child. I wondered who would make a film like 400 Blows, why? And then I met him. I love that one."

"There’s so much to like about it. Really brilliant script. I think it’s an amazingly directed movie. It’s the real trick of that movie, to come out feeling that you’re Irish and hate the English, especially when you’re English, which I am. [laughs] It is one of the most exquisite performances of all time. I saw it when I was a student of acting, and there was lots of people to admire; there was Robert De Niro, and there was Al Pacino, and here was an English person, making such a complete and visceral transformation in character that you just went, “Oh my God, we’re allowed to do that sort of thing, too?” That felt really empowering."

"He was the great innovator and the forerunner to make black music ‘acceptable’ to the general white population of America, and the world. When he came out, you just couldn’t ignore the impact of his voice and delivery of music with piano and arrangements. Putting him and Little Richard together, they’re kind of similar in a way because they had such a big influence. But I can’t ignore the contribution that Ray Charles has made to soul and music at large. If there’s one person that I could emulate with my voice, it would be Ray Charles, perhaps with a little bit of Nina Simone thrown in. I never saw myself as a white boy singer."

"Once, visiting friends in San Francisco, a bookcase came loose from the wall and fell on me. Three people came running in from another room when they heard the crash and saw me sprawled on the floor beneath a mountain of books. Did they say, “Are you all right?” No. In unison, they all said, “Howards End!” That memory, and a recent PBS re-doing (even better than the excellent Merchant Ivory film) of Forster’s novel, have renewed my passion for this book. Its searing depiction of class differences, the wit of its dialogue, and the description of that vine-covered house—no wonder they fought over it!—go together to make this one of my favorites."

"Mizoguchi is a filmmaker I discovered pretty early. When I was younger, I watched anything Scorsese recommended, and I saw an interview with him where he referenced Ugetsu. I just fell in love with Mizoguchi’s work. He called the Academy ratio the “painterly ratio,” and I feel like there are very few filmmakers who did as much with that frame. Sansho the Bailiff is just one of the most devastating melodramas I’ve ever seen, and Ugetsu is a beautiful, ethereal ghost story. His films are quiet while also being extremely harsh and brutal. There’s a clinical, distant quality to his films, but there’s also this aching humanity at the heart of everything he did."