"I remember the impact Lucrecia Martel’s debut feature had on film students, critics, and fellow filmmakers. It was released on one single 35 mm print in Brazil, and that was shredded over a period of a year after playing in just about all noncommercial movie theaters around the country. I love everything about this film: the obliqueness of it, the fresh and bold take on sexuality, the use of sound, the faces and bodies. It was also quite a reference for a filmmaker like me, who like Martel believed films could be about people interacting with a certain feeling of space and time, mediated by cinema itself."

"…and then a Japanese film called After Life. I mean, they’re just movies that I watch when I’m feeling kind of blue and just wanna take more emotional leave of my brain — so it would just be all about creating a head space where I’m really happy, and enjoying myself. And being really happy that people can put together movies that good. It’s all the same thing. It’s the idea that mankind can get together and make something that good — I know how hard it is, how collaborative it is to make a movie, so the idea that all those movies exist is what makes me happy."

"Another film that always floats around in my top five would be a film by Lasse Hallstrom called My Life as a Dog, which is not such a well known film but it was probably the one that brought him most to prominence. It’s a coming-of-age story, really, of a young boy with a very sick mum, you know, trying to find their way in the world, a young child finding their own way in the world, and seeing the exploration of space as a metaphor for their own dreams and adventures. I just think it’s a very poignant and evocative film that’s stayed with me for many years."

"The most piercing, most beautiful sea tale I’ve read. Told almost entirely through dialogue—through Caribbean dialect, no less, where “Captain” becomes “Copm”—with the sparest possible narration, as precise as haiku, and pictographs, inkblots, great tracts of white space on the page. Nine working men set sail on an old schooner out of Grand Cayman, hunting green turtles. They talk to fill the ocean silence, their speech unattributed, and the drama circles and tightens. “Green turtle very mysterious, mon.” The characters sharpen into high suspense and tragedy. Matthiessen’s touch, his ear, his eye, his taut presence just outside the story’s frame—all miraculous, mon."

"I sometimes hear films described as “Lynchian,” which, I take it, means that they deal with a certain space between light and darkness (or perhaps it’s just a more sophisticated way of saying that something is flat-out creepy). The Scarlet Empress is David Lynch for 1934 . . . and by that I mean that the lighting design is crucial. I love the scene where the freaky Grand Duke Peter (whom I recognized as the crotchety book salesman from my childhood favorite—the ever-so-slightly psychedelically tinged—Bedknobs and Broomsticks) emerges from the shadows to meet his new bride, the Princess Sophia Frederica (played by Marlene Dietrich) for the first time"