"I return to Polanski’s early films to get excited about blocking and also adjusting the camera in relation to blocking. He’s the master of the camera adjustment. I’ve learned so much about directing from watching his films. Cul-de-sac is like his existential Beckett movie, and it draws a lot from absurd theater. Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby play with genre so brilliantly, upending conventions while honoring them. Macbeth always struck me as one of his masterpieces, and it’s clearly haunted by the Manson murders in a very visceral way."

"Do I have to say anything? I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t love this film. There’s a reason it ran for over a year in one theater near me growing up in New York (as well as a reason its distributors tried to dump it, since it was so resolutely odd and unique . . . and wonderful). Having Bud Cort do a cameo in my first feature was a private dream come true. A film to live by, this affected and inspired me as much as a person as as a filmmaker."

"For all the splendors in this masterpiece, it’s another scene of actors watching a film within the film that left an impression on me. Guido is in a theater watching rushes of various actresses auditioning for the part of his mistress, while his wife (Anouk Aimée)—trying to contain her conflicted emotions—finally gets up to leave. This sequence was the basis for 8½ Screens, an art installation I did for the opening of TIFF Bell Lightbox, the home of the Toronto International Film Festival. There’s a clip of it on YouTube."

"My first memory was being in the movie theater — the strongest one up to this date, 60 or 48 years later. I still remember the shock of being transported into another dimension. Also, going through the gate of light like if I’d taken a huge dose of acid, like discovering other dimensions. But when you discover dimensions in a safe context as a movie theater, it looks even better. When I came out from that movie, I felt someone had injected me with something in the brain. I was obsessed with going to see the end of 2001. I liked the ape scenes, I like the beginning, but I just wanted to go again and again to see the movie, to go through the Stargate. And I’m happy, I met lately Douglas Trumbull [who did the visual effects on 2001], and we discussed Love, and he’s seen Enter the Void. For me, Douglas Trumbull was one of the very best partners in crime in this masterpiece, and just meeting him for me was just like discovering what was happening behind the curtain of the movie. This is the guy who like opened my mind when I was six years old."