"I really love the enigmatic, haunting approach of this film—how it presents this all-girls boarding school, repressed and rife with secret undercurrents of sexual longing, that then ruptures upon colliding with the mysterious and raw natural world. It’s such a fascinating film to puzzle over, and I find it inspiring how the writer of the original novel, Joan Lindsay, by not providing a solution to the mystery and instead allowing the mystery itself to be the focus, upended narrative expectations and created something so beguiling and unforgettable."

"Gena Rowlands is a force of nature and John Cassavetes’s greatest muse. I saw this movie straight out of theater school and it shook me to the core. Her performance is electric. It was everything I love about acting: raw, dangerous, unpredictable, shocking, alive. You can’t keep your eyes off of her. It’s difficult to explain, but I didn’t know that films could do what Cassavetes does with this film. It was the film that made me see the potential that the medium could have. And it seriously made me want to be in one."

"One of my other favorites is Defending Your Life, the Albert Brooks movie. It’s my favorite of his movies. I was kind of at the exact age where… I was graduating high school when that came out, and it spoke directly to me for whatever reason. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder in a movie theater than the Past Lives Pavilion. It’s a really, really great movie. I don’t know if it’s my second favorite movie ever, but I would put it in my top five."

"I would watch that movie on VHS every night before bed for maybe two years. I’ve always felt a very close kinship with middle-aged women. [laughs] When I was in elementary school, I felt like I understood it. [laughs] I don’t know why. It’s three greats, three great female comedians, and the final song and dance at the end, “You Don’t Own Me,” was something Sarah Paulson and I recreated many a time, filming Martha Marcy May Marlene. It had a new meaning, all of a sudden."

"I have friends who never read books, and so when they ask me what they should pick up first, I always give them this one. I tell them there are some books that are like drugs, and will give you a quick hit, but if you want something that will stay with you and resonate for a long while afterward, then try this. I read it for school, and it speaks to the power of the book that I could analyze the bugger out of it and still not fall out of love with it."

"Huge fan of Marlon Brando. For this man to come out of the shadows playing Don Corleone was just captivating. And it never disappoints; to this day it doesn’t disappoint. That movie is still a spectacle of Americana storytelling with a performance by him which is just inspiring. And he was an inspiring actor, he was certainly somebody who I still go back and watch and… the music, the story, the whole trilogy — It was very much connected to my youth as a young man about to go off to drama school."