"I’m going to go with The Godfather. It’s weird — I didn’t see The Godfather in theaters. I actually saw it on television. I think when I was a little kid, they ran it in a series. It was on over three or four days on television. I remember just being immediately sucked in, and I was a young kid. My mom was actually amazed that I was just so sucked in. I kept asking her all these questions about the film that she had no answer for, and didn’t really care to sit down and watch it, and couldn’t answer the questions, but I was just so curious and I just loved all the drama of it, you know? And it still, it holds up. My wife and I were just watching it on HBO — I think it was HBO — like last night or the night before. They play part one and part two together now. It’s like five hours of The Godfather."

"One of my favorite films is Red Sorghum, by Zhang Yimou, who’s an incredible director — just incredibly visual. The way that he shoots a film and takes a time in history and connects it to somebody; he takes a moment in somebody’s life and also connects it historically to what happened between the Japanese and the Chinese during the war. I just think it’s so elegantly done. It sort of shows not just what’s going on in the family itself, but links that personal story — you get involved in that and then connected to the backdrop of the war, how their family, how their business all kind of connects. It’s incredibly heartbreaking and very real. It was very impactful. I saw it when I was in college, and I was destroyed. [Laughs] Destroyed by that movie. There’s a quality in his movies that really stands out, that I haven’t really seen in a lot of other movies."

"Then there’s another documentary that I saw last time at Sundance, which is called Position Among the Stars. This is a Dutch-Indonesian director who has made a portrait of one family over the course of 12 years in Indonesia. His name is Leonard Retel Helmrich. I talked to him for a few hours on the last day, before he won the award in Sundance, about what he was doing and how he was doing it, because the way in which he conducts his camera is completely different. He said, “I wanted to make a very simple portrait about a very poor family in Indonesia and see if I could find a link to the bigger picture, so to speak, and the alignment of the stars above their head.” And he succeeded. It’s an awesome documentary. It’s just a portrait of a small family, with a universal theme coming out of it at the end."

"Number one is easy, Bedazzled. The original 1967 piece with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. It’s pretty simple. It’s really funny, and strange____. It’s like I think it was a big influence on my. I saw it in the ‘80s when I was a kid. I think it was on my grandma had, I mean she has seen it before we did, and she had few, we had video types, and I remember seeing the words all handwritten in ____ “Bedazzled”, and it big effect when I’ve seen it, and even the word interested me. Dudley Moore is a meek man who’s in love with this woman, and he makes a deal with the devil, played by Peter Cook to keep trying to change himself to be the kind of man that she would like, and I don’t know of course none of them are going to work. There’s always something wrong with the situation."

"The way their styles went back and forth was some sick street shit. Their beats were ill and they had like a slur, a slang style going on that resonated with so many people on the street. When I first heard 'You're A Customer' I was hooked; every single record was so tight and so completely banging. I think they had four or five gold records in a straight row which was such an incredible achievement. They were on some ill roll that just continued. They also listened to the dopest shit too and you could tell that from listening to their music. As well as being influenced by so much themselves, they influenced a lot of people too. Bands like us, Public Enemy, Run-D.M.C were just talking about EPMD so much. Back then, you had to make music that sounded real because if you didn't, people just saw straight through that shit. Most motherfuckers didn't make it but then artists like EPMD showed you how."

"I’m actually going into my favorite filmmakers and trying to pick the best of their films. Because it’s really hard, it’s very very hard to pick your five best[-loved] films. And it would change; if you asked me next week, it would be different. Psycho because…the moment where — and it’s a film I saw on television; I can’t imagine how impactful it would have been to have seen it theatrically when it was first released, but even seeing it as a kid on TV — the moment where Hitchcock, about 30 minutes into the film, kills his leading lady, and you go, “We’re in the hands of a complete madman, and all bets are off at this stage,” was such a powerful thing for me. It’s kind of haunted me ever since, and again, you can only dream of making a film that has that level of impact to an audience."

"I guess the next one, chronologically, would be Raiders of the Lost Ark, even though it’s hard to choose just one Spielberg film. First of all it’s George Lucas and Spielberg, which is kind of like Jesus and Moses collaborating on a movie [laughing]. But it was just, you know, it was so different, it just came out of nowhere. I mean Harrison Ford who had been Han Solo and all of a sudden he’s late ’30s and battling Nazis. It was just such a ride and it still holds up. Just movie magic, know what I mean? I saw it a couple years ago. We were doing a sound mix at Skywalker Sound, it was right before the new one came out, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and they showed a pristine 35mm print of it. It just brought back all those great memories and, again, no CG, you know. Just really good filmmaking."

"This stars Edward G. Robinson, and is directed by Fritz Lang. Edward G. Robinson, of course, was always known as the tough guy, the gangster, the one you do not mess with, and Fritz Lang had the brilliance to sort of counter-cast him as a man having a mid-life crisis. He falls for a younger woman and just throws his life away, and it is so contemporary and so touching and tragic. It’s the kind of thing that I saw probably 30 years ago and couldn’t believe the bravery and vulnerability that Edward G. Robinson put himself through. I always thought of him as a guy holding a gat intimidating Humphrey Bogart. It’s the kind of thing as you get older, his character and the themes of the movie just have more and more resonance. It’s one of those movies that stills holds up because of what it’s about. It’s a timeless subject."

"I saw it at BAM in Brooklyn when they were doing a Schlöndorff retrospective, and I didn’t previously know much of his work but then got super obsessed with him. What’s cool about him is that his films are all totally different. The Tin Drum is a crazy epic story told through the perspective of this young boy, and the voice-over is incredible and takes you through his experience. A lot of people think the voice-over in We the Animals is a reference to Malick, but we’re actually referencing The Tin Drum. What I love about this movie and Ratcatcher is that they show an understanding of childhood sexuality, which you only really see in European films. The other thing that’s really important about The Tin Drum is the color palette. It has this incredibly vibrant, almost Technicolor palette. I showed the film to my DP and everybody that we worked with."

"Jim Jarmusch film. So wonderfully done in black and white. John Lurie stars and does the music. It’s weird because there are no close ups in the film, it’s an objective viewing experience, and yet it’s subjective in the way that Jarmusch points you. You’re given anything to look at, but you’re always looking at the right things. And the idea that it began as a short, just called The New World, but they raised money to make the other two or three acts, is really interesting to me. Great performances, a lot of humor, really slow pace. These were things I wasn’t really used to — the European pace, even though I love The 400 Blows, it was a revelation at the time in 1984. And I saw it when it came out in Austin, and just I think it opened up a new world of storytelling and filmmaking to me on some level."