"Stalker. I went through a big phase, a Tarkovsky phase, when I was in my mid-20s, and that film always stuck with me. For me, I think visually there’s something about that film that manages to get inside your head and touch you on your emotional synapses or something; it somehow just gets in there. And visually: for instance just the shot of this dog, this black dog that’s always wandering around by itself, that… I mean Tarvovsky was a master of symbolism and just knowing, for example, that a candle in a certain place would trigger in most audiences’ minds something to do with memory. And working on an amazing sensory level, with the composition of shots; these big, long shots that just go on forever. And it doesn’t always matter what people are saying — because the film’s full of dialogue, full of poetry and stuff, but that’s what I love about that film, and also The Mirror. It just washes over you, and you can watch it again and again and take more and more in each time. Mirror is also one of my favorites but it’s a baffling, baffling film. It’s the same as in painting, you know: people have to go back and study the old masters to see how they did shit. They’re called masters because they’re still the best that ever were. It’s the same with Kurosawa and Ozu and Tarkovsky: if you look at their films and what they were doing, you kind of feel safe watching those films. With Tarkovsky’s stuff I have to keep going back to it to remind myself that there’s an alternative to the 90-minute American film, you know where it’s all fucking three acts and information, boom-boom-boom, and just to go, “Hey, you know what — there’s a way of communicating that’s different and there’s nothing wrong with that. Don’t be scared to appreciate that stuff.”"

"I, on opening day, saw The Wizard of Oz — 1939, in Providence, Rhode Island. I even remember the theater, the Majestic Theater. Our dad [took us] and we slept in the street that night to wait for the first showing of it. And of course, just like everybody else on this planet, it’s made a lifetime impression on me. As a matter of fact, I think that H.R. Pufnstuft, which was our first television show, the whole feeling came from The Wizard of Oz. It wasn’t like it, but the story — with a boy instead of a girl, and all the characters and the trees and the witch — but we went in a whole other direction with ours. As a matter of fact, when the first Pufnstuft movie came out a year after we did the series, Time Magazine said it was “the next Wizard of Oz.” That was quite a statement. What else? Margaret Hamilton — as a matter of fact, I think the very last job that she had before she left us was in Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. She played the crazy lady next door who kept seeing the little monster and nobody believed her. She did two or three episodes for us. And the reason she wanted to do it? She wanted to meet Billie Hayes, who was Witchiepoo. She said Witchiepoo is the best witch; as a matter of fact, Billie Hayes met her at the airport and they became great friends. And the reason for being of Land of the Lost? In 1940 there was a movie called One Million B.C. Marty was just a couple of years old, and I was eleven. I had never seen a dinosaur moving; no one had. Only in our schoolbooks. I would take him to see One Million B.C. with Victor Mature… wow. That made a huge impression. It scared the hell out of me. Because, like I said, we had never seen a dinosaur moving before! And that idea gave us the idea to do Land of the Lost."