"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."

"I saw The Wild Bunch on a double bill with Mean Streets, midnight at the Waverly Place Cinema on Bleecker Street in New York [in the 1970s]. Those two played on a double bill; I was in New York, I had a studio and I was basically a practicing artist, working with various art groups — Art & Language, kind of conceptual arts, political arts. We were doing environments, we were doing installations, performance pieces…and I stumbled into this incredible double bill. And it was a life-changing experience. I thought they were just extraordinary. [Sam] Peckinpah for his muscularity, his immediacy, his sheer genius in his storytelling and characters. I was knocked out."

"When I was a boy I dreamed of sailing and exploring the the open seas. I know my inspiration arose from watching episodes of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. This almanac was the first gift I received from my then girlfriend, now wife, and why I still love her. She saw my passion for the ocean and presented me with a book by my hero. Cousteau gives many examples of how we have been destroying our shared environment for thousands of years. But more importantly, he always leads us to solutions we can implement to save and restore our planet. “We have one planet. We have to take care of it.”"

"This record was the precursor to my operatic downfall when I was 13. Before opera there was Annie Lennox - she inhabited that realm of drama and beauty and the ephemeral. So I was obsessed with that record and I think also, even though at the time I wasn't necessarily aware of my sexuality, it definitely spoke to this self-discovery that was bound to happen, regarding the tenuous nature of gender. That album cover with her looking like a man was just so life-changing – I imagine a bit like when people saw Bowie's record covers. For me, Annie Lennox in that macho pose made so much sense without me knowing what the hell it meant."

"I don’t think I’d be in this business if it wasn’t for Naughty Marietta, with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. I was 14 and I was SO in love with Nelson Eddy I thought it was the end of the world, and I didn’t just like Jeanette MacDonald, I was Jeanette MacDonald! You know, at 14. And at 14 I also thought, Nelson Eddy married somebody and I thought he needed a much younger woman. I think I saw Naughty Marietta 48 times. I wasn’t even interested in show business until then; I did school plays and that kind of thing, but I hadn’t thought of it as a career until I got hooked."

"I think the fifth greatest movie I ever saw was The Last Emperor. Again, it really happened. I mean he [director Bernardo Bertolucci] also could make a movie. The thing I’m leaving you with is this: I’m a runner. When you run, it’s about your training, and it’s the same way with filmmaking. If you miss a day as a runner, only you know it. If you miss two days, your opponent knows it. And if you’ve missed three days, the crowd knows it. All the movies I mentioned, you had, I don’t know, 60 to 150 shooting days. And every single day, everybody on the set brought it to work – everybody."

"One of the first movies I saw on a date after my marriage fell apart. My date and I, both single parents, were glued to the performances of Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette–parents doing the best they can with the tools they have, all while the clock of their son’s childhood ticks on. I know other people were amazed at Richard Linklater’s feat of filming over twelve years. But I would have been sold on the story if there were twelve different actors: I loved the longitudinal look at how the decisions or mistakes that parents make can define their son’s childhood. And, like The Ice Storm, Boyhood never loses touch with our constituency: the boy."

"I saw this one again a few weeks ago in its incredible restored director’s cut. I have always admired Michael Cimino, and I loved Heaven’s Gate when it was released—with some quibbles. Now, I can’t believe I could have had any quibble about this masterpiece. It’s not just that it ages well; it wipes away any doubt: for some reason the passing of time (remember the only genuinely moving tagline ever? What one loves in life are things that fade.) reveals this film as the extraordinary, transcendent triumph I could not see then. And the way it finally reaches us through the echo of time only makes it more moving, heartbreaking, even."

"Color me gone, baby. I wouldn’t have seen this movie at twelve. I wouldn’t have understood anyone who didn’t have a mission, a point. But at nineteen, my face was gravel from “points.” I was ready for a whole lot of steel nothing, an empty road at high speeds, an existential needle guiding my arms. I knew little or nothing about automobiles, but I fell in love with this road trip, and made a couple myself, LA to Detroit, Tijuana to Spokane, no sleep, all little white pills and mud coffee. I never saw anyone as beautiful as James Taylor and Dennis Wilson passing me on the left, but I was ready to follow."