"This would have to be my favorite classic novel. It’s such a beautiful, tragic love story—a book that will just destroy you. And Faulkner’s language is so utterly descriptive. He can write an entire page that consists of only adjectives and two commas. Actually, he’s the reason I ended up passing high school English, because my punctuation was always kind of…eccentric. I would say to my teacher, ‘Well, you know, William Faulkner—he doesn’t use proper punctuation.’ And one of my teachers ended up devising a system with two grades, where you were graded on content and then on whether it was properly written."

"There’s this movie called Le Souffle. It was called Deep Breath. It’s a f—ing amazing movie. It’s about a teenage boy who is kind of expelled from school, and he has to live with his uncle, I think, in the French countryside. I remember watching it when I was maybe 18 or 19, and I just loved the performances in it so much, and I think it’s kind of like a kid who’s on the run from himself in a way. I think it’s kind of quite related to Good Time as well. It’s just incredibly, beautifully shot. Yeah, that’s one of them."

"Denzel just became Malcolm, and Spike Lee did an incredible job. And again, the story behind that of getting Oprah, whomever else to aid in it, finishing the movie. Even Spike, and what he did as an actor, even if it’s sort of playing his thing. It was just really, really good. He’s done, obviously, great ones. You know the other ones, Mo’ Better Blues and School Daze, and Do the Right Thing was just unbelievable. But there was so much polish and the brilliance in how he did this testimonial of an iconic guy that many people at the end started to really relate to, even more than Dr. King."

"I was also introduced to Michael Powell’s work during film school, and this one particularly blew my mind. I love when all the kids rush into the theater at the beginning to get good seats in the balcony. A title comes on-screen that reads, “45 minutes later,” but the shot never cuts or changes. From that point on, I knew I was in good hands. This film taught me that silent-film techniques could, and probably should, be employed in modern sound films. It has taken me several projects of my own to incorporate this lesson, but I’m getting there. I also love films about artists and the creative process."

"The first, and to date one of maybe three, film I ever bought a second, superior edition of. I have seen this film perhaps ten times in the theater, and watched it at home maybe twice but still felt the need to own it, and then own it again. I came to this film because, my freshman year of film school, we did a class on cinematography, one on music, one on acting, one on editing, etc., and then watched this film as an example of something that does every one of those things with sublime perfection. I never get tired of revisiting it."

"It’s the first of Haneke’s film I saw. When we were in film school, Sean [Durkin] called me and said, "You've got to see this film." We went to the NYU library and he first showed me two scenes: the one on the train where Juliette Binoche gets spit on and the red room scene where she gets directed off screen by Haneke. It was one of these moments where I had been waiting to see a film language that really spoke to me and this film had it, it made so much sense to me. From there I fell in love with Haneke."

"My main thing for music has always been the radio; that’s where I’ve heard things. Around age 5, when I was getting ready for school, my mum would get us up, and we would have breakfast in the kitchen, and the radio would be on. It would be the BBC Radio 2, which is the easy listening station. So I remember hearing a song called “If You Could Read My Mind” by Gordon Lightfoot whilst I was having my hair brushed and trying to keep still—because if you moved when you were having your hair brushed in the morning, my mother used to get in a really bad mood."