"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."

"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."

"I don’t always love Parajanov’s roaming camera in this movie, but he settled down from Color of Pomegranates onwards. Parajanov’s love for the folk culture is quite infectious. The way that he loves everything on screen, I relate. And the winter mummers are so mysterious. He makes this Hutsul culture come alive and it’s so exotic. Now I know a lot about Carpathian culture and Slavic folklore so the movie doesn’t have a lot of mystery to me anymore. But the first time I saw these images that I couldn’t understand, I was completely conquered because he so clearly understood them [and] they were infused with some kind of meaning that just felt essential to me."

"Black Like Me, but I felt a way, because as I'm reading I realized it's about a white man dressed in black face in the '60s to see what it feels like to be black. It's cool to see these detailed experiences of how white people treated him, but at the same time, he was able to just go back to his regular white life. But we deal with this shit everyday. We can't just wipe our color off — which is great, I love my color, but it definitely made me feel a way. I'm still glad I saw the perversion that was happening with the treatment of black people, so for that reason, I appreciate the book."

"I actually saw Earth, Wind And Fire play. I went to a Santana gig in Manchester in 1975 and they were the support band. My God! They blew Santana – and me – away! They came on with flame-throwers and nearly singed our eyebrows off, you know? The music came with all kinds of layers and rogue elements like that Brazilian aspect in the chords. It's a really varied album and there's not much here in what you would call traditional black music. There are certain things here that crossed over, in the way that Stevie Wonder crossed over. The commercial radio station in Manchester was Piccadilly Radio and the Earth, Wind And Fire was always on Piccadilly Radio."

"This isn't part of any phase in my life. I just heard it on Peel, and it had this "gathering of the tribes" time signature - not sure if that's true or not, but it's such a strange record. The delivery... the first line, "Saw her face in the window, it looks quite strange..." That's brilliant. And it's like an odd, surreal miniature. I don't know what it is that makes me like it so much. The chorus goes, "I just can't believe that looking over you, I find you appealing, but it seems that I do." That sums up the way I feel about the record. It's not a pretty record, but I love it."

"When I grew up, grandma would say, “Why do you like this movie so much?” And I would say, “Because I am Kit Keller. You don’t understand, like I am Kit.” It was very influential, and I saw it when I was four or five. Must have been really, really young. And I just remember, it made it seem normal that women could play baseball. I absolutely loved Lori Petty, like Lori Petty was me. I related to her in so many ways. I played baseball, I played softball. And, yeah, I even made a costume, a Halloween costume, for myself one year of the Rockford Peaches. It was just an amazing movie."

"I want to start off with a film you’ve probably seen called Mind Game, by Masaaki Yuasa. It’s a very interesting story. It’s a Japanese film; it’s not anime. It’s very western, actually. It came out in 2005, and critics panned it in Japan, and therefore the producers lost their nerve and shelved the film, which is very sad. I saw it at the Asian Film Festival, and I think you can see it online, but to me, it’s the Citizen Kane of animation. It is such an ambitious and visually unique film. It’s just full of action and full of crazy ideas and surrealism and humor and just beautiful, beautiful craftsmanship."

"Saw this at a Bresson retrospective at MOMA, popular dinner spot of many of NYC’s finest moviegoers. And who knew dinner could be so work-intensive, demanding to be unwrapped and rewrapped several times over? Now that I have Laurie Bird on my mind, I am seeing her resemblance and similarity to Balthazar’s Anne Wiazemsky. Maybe these two films have more in common than I would have thought. Both involve brown hair with bangs, drifters, and modes of transportation, although in the case of Balthazar the real tragic, beautiful victim is the donkey. You just don’t get more beautiful and tragic than a donkey. Let it be said that I did not liken James Taylor to a donkey."

"What else do I love? Well The Sound of Music is what, I think, made me wanna be an actor. I was so young when I saw it. I wanted to be one of the Von Trapp children. [laughs] It’s what started my love of music, singing; the whole thing. Any time it’s on I get this sort of “home” feeling. It’s one of those things, when it’s on, I feel guilty changing the channel. You get sucked in. And it holds up, too. When I went with my mom to Italy, we took a trip to Austria to go specifically on The Sound of Music tour, when I was 12 or something. [laughs] So that’s one."