"Sometimes my biggest reasons for connecting to a film are simple, primitive, just about a feeling. Videodrome and Repo Man are two that fit into that category. In addition to the fact that it costars Debbie Harry in my favorite roll of hers, I love Videodrome for its particular use of my hometown, Toronto. Sure, Toronto is used in films all the time, but usually disguised as New York, or Chicago or Detroit. No filmmaker has used Toronto better and more consistently over the years than our hometown hero Cronenberg, though, and Videodrome he shot and set in the downtown Toronto of my childhood, complete with a central part of the story revolving around our local cable station CityTV (as “Civic TV,” the station James Woods’s character, Max Renn, works for), which really did play soft-core porn if you stayed up late enough. To this day, my dad lives on the street Max Renn lives on, and Barry Convex’s Spectacular Optical is a bakery on the same street as the Electric Youth studio downtown, just a minute away, making the connection both past and present. Repo Man has my favorite Criterion release cover art; it’s amazing and designed by movie poster artist Jay Shaw, who also designed the artwork for singles from our album Innerworld. With Repo Man you get Harry Dean Stanton in his first big-screen lead role, Emilio Estevez as his partner, and the streets of Reagan-era Los Angeles set to a classic punk soundtrack. What more would I need to love this film? Nothing. But like with all great Criterion selections, there’s always something new to take from it with every watch."

"Sometimes my biggest reasons for connecting to a film are simple, primitive, just about a feeling. Videodrome and Repo Man are two that fit into that category. In addition to the fact that it costars Debbie Harry in my favorite roll of hers, I love Videodrome for its particular use of my hometown, Toronto. Sure, Toronto is used in films all the time, but usually disguised as New York, or Chicago or Detroit. No filmmaker has used Toronto better and more consistently over the years than our hometown hero Cronenberg, though, and Videodrome he shot and set in the downtown Toronto of my childhood, complete with a central part of the story revolving around our local cable station CityTV (as “Civic TV,” the station James Woods’s character, Max Renn, works for), which really did play soft-core porn if you stayed up late enough. To this day, my dad lives on the street Max Renn lives on, and Barry Convex’s Spectacular Optical is a bakery on the same street as the Electric Youth studio downtown, just a minute away, making the connection both past and present. Repo Man has my favorite Criterion release cover art; it’s amazing and designed by movie poster artist Jay Shaw, who also designed the artwork for singles from our album Innerworld. With Repo Man you get Harry Dean Stanton in his first big-screen lead role, Emilio Estevez as his partner, and the streets of Reagan-era Los Angeles set to a classic punk soundtrack. What more would I need to love this film? Nothing. But like with all great Criterion selections, there’s always something new to take from it with every watch."

"Another black and white, this one from Belgium, 1992. I think I saw it at the Toronto Film Festival with Quentin Tarantino. It’s a hilariously dark, fake documentary about a serial killer and his concerned friends and family. It’s not for everybody, but it genuinely shocked me while I laughed my ass off. Kudos to directors Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde."

"In the Robertson Davies novel Fifth Business, that first-chapter snowball gave me the idea for the baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany, whose initials (O.M.) are modeled on the Grass hero of The Tin Drum (Oskar Matzerath). When I was married in Toronto, Davies read from the Bible at the wedding. "There is something of Byron about John Irving," Davies once wrote about me. Yes, I suppose so, and something of Dickens about Robertson Davies."

"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."