"Spike Lee’s third film. I had just started doing films in high school and Do the Right Thing came out, and there was just this burst of creativity in a drama, of creative energy, and also just the social commentary, and Spike being in it, and the music, and the color, the production design. Then I read the book on the making of it. I read the book that he wrote for She’s Gotta Have It. I really became, like, a Spike Lee connoisseur, you know? But again, just to kind of open my eyes, it took me from kind of like what we were talking about before, like the shiny effects, you know, that kid of shiny object interest of childhood, to movies that can really make you think, and make you talk, make you think about what is going on, and his social commentary really affected me. It really took me from kind of like a Spielberg/Lucas type of filmmaker toward a more socially conscious filmmaker. I actually did a film that was very inspired by Do the Right Thing called Gabriel’s Dream that never got distributed. But it was about these workers in a particularly hot summer in Maryland, and they were trying to get A/C in their factory, and that was basically the story. Like, workers’ rights. It kind of really took me in a direction that I never thought I would go in. And it never came out, it did some festivals, and we never got distribution for it, this was like early 1990s. But it definitely opened my eyes to the power of cinema as a social statement, as a social tool. And I wrote two or three scripts after that that were very much inspired by Do the Right Thing, kind of touching on social issues. I was really that kind of filmmaker when I was in film school. But then we came up with the idea for Blair Witch and all of a sudden, we became “horror filmmakers.” But still, I love the idea of always having a little bit of the deeper meaning in material. And some films are just for fun and made that way, but there are others where you want to dig a little deeper. If you can get one person coming out of the theater thinking about what happened in the movie, I think it’s great. And Do the Right Thing consumed me. It was such an important film in my upbringing, you know?"

"I remember being baffled by the first Sam Fuller film I saw when I was in my late teens or early twenties, a revival at the old St. Mark’s theater on Second Avenue in New York. The audience was guffawing and cheering and I thought it was really stupid: some kind of condescending intellectual slumming, about a movie that looked to me like plain harmless, and pretty much sincere, if inept, cheap melodramatic exposé. It was Shock Corridor. The movie was bad, but the audience was worse. I can’t remember which film turned me around. The Naked Kiss? That’s a great one, as is Shock Corridor. Eventually I also learned how highly Fuller is rated by the most intellectual film analysts. I think what makes Fuller so popular with them is Fuller’s unpretentiousness, not because it’s naive, but because it makes him a purer example of filmmaking talent: since there’s no subtlety, no subtext, no self-consciousness, it means that to enjoy it you’ve got to enjoy it for the pure, abstract methods of film as film. Famously, his roots are in two realms, tabloid journalism and World War II (where he saw a lot of action with the infantry). In a scene at a party in Godard’s Pierrot le fou, when he’s asked what cinema is, he says, “Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion.” And that’s the way his films feel: like they’re emotion, the way music is. They’re not about ideas except on the most basic level, like a tabloid. They’re “hard-boiled,” and there’s tabloid/sensationalist fury and irony. His fight scenes are thrilling and like no one else’s; you can recognize them in a second. His style altogether is distinctive. Everything is in your face. Lots of close-ups, lots of tracking in for close-ups, long takes with plenty of camera movement. It is like pulp journalism, like a fluid Weegee. Emotion. As corny and cartoony as she is, Thelma Ritter’s last scene in this is really moving. She actually got an Academy Award nomination for supporting actress for the role. The close-up smooching of Richard Widmark and Jean Peters can leave you breathless too, even though the sessions usually end with him mocking or slapping her. In 1974, when I was first singing my song “Love Comes in Spurts” at CBGB, I sometimes used to introduce it with the line that comes when Widmark’s kissed an eager Peters and she’s told him she really likes him and he sneers, “Everybody likes everybody when they’re kissing.”

"Just for sh–s and giggles, I want to pick a recent one, but you just never know until years go by whether movies stand up. You love them at first, and you love them the first five times, but 10 years down the line, will you still not be able to switch the channel if this film comes on? I don’t know, but I’m going to pick one, my favorite film of last year. I’m going to say La La Land. I recently worked with Adam Siegel, who was one of the producers. I worked with him on a film called Hotel Artemis, and we have had this conversation, and he asked me what I loved about it. This was the first time I really pinpointed it. I didn’t go when it first came out, because I just didn’t have any interest — musical, just not my thing, I just don’t. So I didn’t really want to go see it. Then it was re-released after the Golden Globes, and I was like, “I’ve got to go see what the hype is all about.” I went and saw it, and I sat in the theater by myself, thinking, “This is the best thing I’ve seen in a long time.” What it was, was that it made me feel like Hollywood was romantic again. I don’t feel that when I go out there. What I feel like now is that it’s a town full of people who want to be on reality shows. It made me feel like old Hollywood. It just made me feel romantic, like this is what I love about films. There was just something very romantic about that film, and just I love it. Then the music is incredible. What I really, really love about it is it’s just completely unpredictable, because up until the very end of that film, I had no idea how it was going to end, and I love that. That is so hard to do nowadays, just to keep people guessing right up to the last two minutes of the film. Like, it’s almost impossible. They did it, and not only did it, but in a magical, exciting way. I just love that movie. And some of the shots, I mean, just technically, some of the shots were amazing. Like, I still don’t know how the hell they did that shot in the pool. When I saw it, I couldn’t believe it, and I just thought and thought and thought, and was trying to figure out how the hell they shot that."