"I’m going to go with Raging Bull. I love Raging Bull. That’s another one I saw at a young age, and I didn’t love it at first. I didn’t know what to think of it. I was like, “This isn’t Rocky.” [Laughs] I was compelled and disturbed by what it was doing, stuff I didn’t get at the time. But that movie struck me at my core. I didn’t know if I liked it, but then I had to come back to it, and then I became obsessed with it and his whole career. It’s very hard to pick a favorite movie of his. Raging Bull is one I go back to, and there’s something between the expressionistic filmmaking of those boxing matches. There’s just a neo-realism in the dynamic between him, his brother, and his wife. It’s really powerful and incredibly inspiring."

"like to think of this as Lennon and Elvis, you know what I mean? Lennon wouldn’t have been there without Elvis and I wouldn’t be here without The Stone Roses. Ian Brown as a frontman had the look and he was cool as fuck. He was my Elvis. The first time I saw them, that was it! I thought, “I want that!” I’d heard our kid play ‘Sally Cinnamon’ round the house and I went to see them just before the album came out and it was like, “This is it, man! This is the next fucking step!” It was like growing up a bit and you’re thinking, “This is the band that’s going to guide me to chicks and being a cool young man.” You know what I mean? This was the album that was going to carry me through. They were my guiding star."

"I chose the second Elvis Costello record because it had the whole band and I saw those guys so many times in that period. The band was so excellent and the songwriting and the lyrics were so excellent, Elvis Costello was a singular talent in that period. Both Elvis and David Byrne were coming across with these songs that were so amazing – they were nodding backwards towards classic pop and yet they were doing new and innovative things with it, and the lyrics were so inspiring. They were both such inspiring lyric writers. In different ways both writing about alienation in modern society: Elvis is this vitriolic way and David Byrne in this meek Clark Kent kind of thing, but they were both railing against what society was becoming and what it was trying to make of its citizens and they were both of their ways very punk."

"That movie is the coolest Elmore Leonard adaptation that there is. It made me read a book. I went and read Get Shorty after I saw that. That never happens. Soderbergh to me in that movie is at his … I mean, because everything he does is … He may be my most favorite filmmaker, but he’s at his most commercial and Soderberghian. He had just shot The Limey, and he got that out of his system, and he was dabbling; there was that weird Jackie Brown connection. It was just awesome. It’s just so good. He’s got my favorite line in any movie, when Dennis Farina leans over to Michael Keaton, who’s wearing a tee shirt that says, “FBI” on it, and he goes, “You got one of those that says ‘undercover?'” He’s on in Out Of Sight. He should have won a million Oscars."

"I was in film school when I first saw this film. I didn't understand it. Or, more specifically, I watched it and then couldn't grasp what had happened in any linear sense. I had conversations with film school friends about it, but I just couldn't really remember anything except a girl-on-girl love scene and an audition. I watched it twenty-two times this way, not really remembering. Then one night, on an MDMA comedown, I couldn't sleep and it was 8:00 a.m. and the movie was coming on. And suddenly I was able to process every second. It's interesting, because a fever dream is a hard thing to grasp, and I like Lynch's films because they induce these dreams. That morning I was living a fever dream, so the film was suddenly apparent. And it's such a complete portrait of the agony of Hollywood."

"As of this writing, it’s been nearly a year since we lost the talent and spirit of Chantal Akerman. Her 1975 breakthrough feature wowed the international film world after premiering at Cannes to a combination of raves and an audience exodus. Truly a film to return to again and again, Jeanne Dielman expands the possibilities of cinema as an art form. Its durational, physiological impact on the viewer is an absolute revelation. I first saw it on a crappy 16 mm print in college in the late 1980s and didn’t get to see it again on the big screen until the late ’90s—on 35 mm at the San Francisco LGBT Film Festival. Now I like to watch it in segments on Hulu (sort of the opposite of binge-watching) just for the shift in consciousness it induces in me after each twenty-minute chunk. Transcendent."